SYDNEY - An Australian ex-airline employee was jailed for nine years on Friday for producing a do-it-yourself jihad manual including how-to guides on bomb-making, assassinations and shooting down planes.

Former Qantas cabin cleaner Belal Khazaal was arrested in June 2004 over his Arabic-language "Provisions of the Rules of Jihad: Short Judicial Rulings and Organisational Instructions for Fighters and Mujahideen Against Infidels".

The 110-page book by Lebanese-born Khazaal, 39, included a hit-list naming former US president George W. Bush and his CIA chief George Tenet, and advice on letter-bombs, booby-traps and kidnappings.

Khazaal was arrested less than a year after being sentenced in absentia to 10 years' hard labour by a Lebanese court for alleged involvement in funding a bomb attack on a Beirut McDonald's restaurant, along with other blasts.

He denied that the book was intended to incite extremist acts, but was found guilty by a Supreme Court jury last September of knowingly making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act.

Sentencing judge Megan Latham said it "beggars belief that a person of average intelligence who has devoted themselves to the study of Islam over some years would fail to recognise the nature of the material."

Latham described the book as a "terrorism training manual" which advocated "widespread and indiscriminate loss of life, serious injury and serious property damage".

The book was posted on a radical Islamist site under the pseudonym Abu Mohamed Attawheedy, and examined why some assassinations failed while others succeeded, such the 1981 killing of former Eqyptian president Anwar Sadat.