A TAMIL asylum seeker from South Harrow who admitted being involved in credit-card cloning at the petrol station where he worked has been jailed for ten months.

Mohammed Malik, of Somerville Road, worked at the Texaco service station on the Great West Road at Brentford/South Ealing. The garage manager, concerned at the level of credit card fraud traced to the station, returned unexpectedly during the evening shift and saw a suspicious device attached to the till, Isleworth Crown Court heard.

Prosecutor Beverly Cripps said: "He saw a black box under the counter and asked cashier Mohammed Malik what it was. I have been put up to it. I have family problems', he said. But then he left the premises and did not return."

Malik, who lives with his pregnant wife and baby in South Harrow, was not arrested for nine months and when the case came to trial he pleaded guilty to one charge of going equipped to cheat in March last year and claimed he had been threatened.

Malik told the court he had been stopped by a car full of men on his way to work. He had been threatened with being shot and having his house "blown up", and was given the black box' and told how to use it. He had it only on that day, he claimed.

Judge Jonathon Lowen rejected his story saying his account was "inherently implausible". He said he did not accept this explanation but "quite what the truth is remains completely obscure".

Jailing him for ten months, he pointed out that the black box' contained the details of 11 credit cards when it was seized.

"This criminal plan, by its nature, was much wider than simply what you did," he said. "You were a trusted employee and you abused that position as a cashier at a service station, by installing a device which was an essential piece of equipment in the wider plan of cloning credit cards, allowing fraudulent activity on a number of bank accounts".

Defence counsel Michelle Harris said Malik was an asylum seeker awaiting a decision and his wife was not allowed to work, so would be in poor straits if he went to prison. Asylum was less likely now that Sri Lanka had "settled down," she added.