The teenage sniper accused of killing ten people in three weeks of random bloodshed that terrified the Washington area has been revealed as cool, calculating and unrepentant in a taped confession played to a jury.

Asked why he had fired the shots instead of John Allen Muhammad, his convicted accomplice and surrogate father, Lee Boyd Malvo replied: “It’s a plan. You stick to it. You don’t deviate. You don’t change it.”

Killer Lee Boyd Malvo admitted that he pulled the trigger in the sniper killings, but is pleading insanity in his defence.

Mr Malvo, portrayed by his lawyers as a “child soldier” turned into an insane killing machine by the older man, told his interrogator in a calm, unemotional voice: “I intended to kill them all.”

For the jury in Chesapeake, Virginia, this week, it was the first opportunity to hear the Jamaican-born 18-year-old explain why he had taken up position in the boot of a car that had allegedly been transformed into a sniper’s lair and opened fire on multiple occasions between October 2 and 22, last year.

He was only 17 at the time of the killings of an apparently random group of people — victims were mowing the lawn, in shopping centre car parks or filling cars with petrol. Three people were also seriously wounded, including a 13-year-old boy.

But, like Muhammad, a 42-year-old Gulf War veteran who was found guilty on Monday of masterminding the attacks, he faces the death penalty if convicted.

Jurors listened to more than an hour of his 100-minute interview with Samuel Walker, a policeman, made on November 8 last year.

He said that the men had wanted authorities to comply with demands for a $10 million “ransom” and that they wanted to provoke chaos and martial law in the Washington suburbs to achieve their goal.

They chose the affluent Maryland suburbs north of the American capital to start the killing spree because it was the “perfect” place.

Mr Malvo said: “The boys with the money are gonna say: ‘Look, how much are they asking for? We can make, what, a hundred million dollars in say a week? What is this for? Why are we doing this? This is futile. Give them what they want.’ ”

Asked if he pulled the trigger in each case, he said: “Basically, yeah.” Asked to clarify, he said: “In all of them.”

The men were arrested on October 24, 2002, as they slept in Muhammad’s 1990 Chevrolet Caprice in a layby. Investigators found the rifle linked to the killings inside. They also found evidence that the teenager, but not Muhammad, had handled it.

His lawyers said that he had accepted too much responsibility for the killings and that he was trying to protect his “father”.

Their client has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but prosecutors are seeking the death penalty and have portrayed him as highly intelligent.

With Muhammad, he has been linked to 13 deaths and six woundings, some of them in Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana in attacks that predated the Washington killing spree.

An hour into the recording, the detective asked how long the pair had planned to keep shooting people. “The detectives could have stopped us at six,” the teenager’s voice replied. “They chose not to.”

The first five Washington area killings happened between the evening of October 2 and the next morning in affluent Montgomery County, Maryland. The next was on the evening of October 3, in the capital itself. Another four people were killed between October 9 and 22.

The first known communication from the snipers came on October 7 in the form of a tarot card depicting death with the words: “Mister Policeman, I am God.”

On October 19, the snipers left a letter demanding cash and saying that their attempts to contact Montgomery police had been foiled by police incompetence.

Mr Malvo is on trial for the killing of Linda Franklin, 47, an FBI analyst and breast cancer survivor, who was shot in front of her husband in a shopping centre car park in Falls Church, Virginia, on October 14.

CONFESSION

“I intended to kill them all”

“Basically, yeah . . . In all of them” (on being asked whether he had squeezed the trigger in all the shootings)

“You aim for the upper-left chest cavity . . . he’s dead”

“I knew they were dead when I took the shot”

“I think the order was planned very well”

Detective Samuel Walker: “OK, if there were other people at the gas pumps, why did you select the target? Malvo: “He came within my zone”.

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