A jury has retired to consider its verdict in the case of a man accused of launching a murderous terror attack on Muslims in Finsbury Park last year.

Earlier, the eight women and four men heard Darren Osborne’s lawyer claim he holds such abhorrent views of Islam that he has no other reason to deny carrying out the van attack than because he is innocent.

Delivering her closing speech at Woolwich crown court on Thursday morning, the lawyer for 48-year-old Darren Osborne accepted the prosecution’s claim he had developed a “warped hatred of Muslims” in the weeks preceding the incident last June, in which one man died and others were seriously injured.

Lisa Wilding QC also accepted that Osborne had been in central London the previous day looking to carry out a similar attack against Muslims.

“The question I ask is this: why would a man so intent on killing – as he agrees he was – who appeared to want to have his say, to proclaim his case and give his views, why would he deny doing the very thing he set out to do if, in fact, he had done it?” she asked the jury.

Osborne is accused of driving a van into a group of people wearing traditional Muslim dress in the early hours of 19 June, killing 51-year-old Makram Ali and injuring others.

Referring to evidence he gave, in which he claimed a man named Dave was at the wheel, Wilding said: “If you think that Dave might have been the person driving the van, then the prosecution have not made you sure that the defendant was the person who drove that van.”

The jury heard the closing speech from the prosecutor, Jonathan Rees QC, on Wednesday.

Osborne is charged with Ali’s murder and the attempted murders of other people. He denies the charges. The trial continues.