LONDON, July 15: A television documentary aired on Thursday showed members of the far-right British National Party making highly derogatory remarks Islam and confessing to assaults on Muslims.

The BBC expose brought furious reactions from Britain's Muslims and government, and undercut the BNP's efforts to cultivate a more moderate image. It may also lead to criminal prosecutions.

In secretly recorded footage in the northern town of Keighley, BNP leader Nick Griffin - who recently hosted French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen - rails against the holy Quran and acknowledges his views are legally dangerous.

"That's the way that this wicked, vicious faith has expanded ... It's now sweeping country after country," he says at one point. He tells his audience they should stand up for the party or "they (Muslims) will do for someone in your family.

"I will get seven years if I said that outside," he adds. Other footage in "The Secret Agent" shows one BNP member expressing a wish to blow up mosques with a rocket launcher and to machine-gun worshippers with "about a million bullets."

Another member tells how he put dog faeces through an Asian shop's letterbox, while a third describes how he beat up a Muslim man. "I'm kicking away ... it was fantastic," he says.

Police in West Yorkshire where filming took place were waiting to see the programme to decide whether to press charges. "We will always prosecute where we find evidence of anyone being involved in racially motivated crime," a spokesman said.

Leaders of Britain's nearly 2 million Muslims - already worried about a rise in race hate since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks - said the programme unmasked the BNP. "It has tried for a false image of respectability. Yet under the surface lurks the same hatred of the foreigner," Inayat Bunglawala, of the Muslim Council of Britain, told Reuters.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission called for the BNP to be banned, comparing its "hate-filled propaganda" with that which preceded ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s.

The BNP's anti-immigration stance has won it a handful of council seats, mainly in poorer areas with large ethnic populations. But it remains on the fringe of politics and is largely ostracised by media and mainstream parties.

The government's leader in parliament Peter Hain said the BNP was an organisation with long-standing criminal connections. "This is a statement of the vilest kind by a vile party of Nazi thugs and the sooner we confront them and beat them the better," he told legislators of the BNP remarks caught on TV. The BNP responded to the expose by expelling the two members who admitted assaults and vowing to discipline the third. -Reuters