Al Qaeda has been distributing its top secret plans across the internet embedded and encrypted within a file of a porn movie.

According to the German newspaper Die Zeit the file was discovered on a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin. When he was questioned his interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards. Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."

These are not the usual thing you expect to find on a Muslim fundamentalist, although it was viable for a Christian fundamentalist politician, so the investigators smelt a rat. It took several weeks to crack the a password and software to make the file visible and it turned out that there were more than 100 al Qaeda documents included inside the file. These included some plans for taking over cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants in Mumbai in November 2008.

There were terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic were among the documents, too, according to intelligence sources. Investigative journalist Yassin Musharbash, a reporter with the German newspaper Die Zeit said that one plan was to hijack a passenger ship. They would dress passengers in orange jump suits, as if they were al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and then videotape their execution.  That was before the idea of travelling on a cruise ship turned out to be such dangerous exercise, particularly if it was piloted by an Italian.