A paid informant for the New York Police Department's intelligence unit was under orders to 'bait' Muslims into saying incriminating things as he lived a double life.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent, was paid up to $1,000 per month for snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

He now denounces his work as an informant, saying police told him to embrace a strategy called 'create and capture.'

( WHAT A NAME!!  CREATE AND CAPTURE !! )

The strategy had him create a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD.

In addition to the monthly payments, Rahman also earned goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

'We need you to pretend to be one of them,' Rahman recalled the police telling him. 'It's street theater.'

Rahman, who said he plans to move to the Caribbean, said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was 'detrimental to the Constitution.'

After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, 'Steve,' and his handler's NYPD phone number was disconnected.

Rahman's account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighborhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.

Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD's wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as 'mosque crawlers' — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there's no evidence they committed a crime.

The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.

Within the ranks: According to the report, the NYPD regularly sent a number of informants into Muslim-heavy events

Really, Rahman was mining his new friends for details about their lives, taking pictures of them when they ate at restaurants and writing down license plates on the orders of the NYPD.

On the NYPD's instructions, he went to more events at John Jay, including when Siraj Wahhaj spoke in May. Wahhaj, 62, is a prominent but controversial New York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years.

Prosecutors included his name on a 3 ½-page list of people they said 'may be alleged as co-conspirators' in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged. In 2004, the NYPD placed Wahhaj on an internal terrorism watch list and noted: 'Political ideology moderately radical and anti-American.'

Rahman was told to spy on the speakers at the annual Islamic Circle of North America and Muslim American Society held in Hartford, Connecticut. According to NYPD documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD sent three informants there in 2008 and was keeping tabs on the group's former president.

Rahman, who was born in Queens, said he never witnessed any criminal activity or saw anybody do anything wrong.