A man has gone on trial accused of carrying out a terrifying hold-up at a beauty salon.

Junaid Ahmed, 21, is alleged to have pointed an imitation handgun at a beauty therapist and her client as he demanded the keys to the customer’s black Audi S3 which had been parked outside the Yorkshire Beauty School on Bradford Road, Shipley.

Ahmed denies all involvement with the robbery, which he said is a case of “mistaken identity”.

A jury at Bradford Crown Court was shown CCTV of a suspect wearing a baseball cap walking through the front door of the salon in the middle of the afternoon and then leaving the premises with the keys to the vehicle which was driven off.

In a statement read to the jury, the car owner Molly Bairstow described how an angry male had walked into the treatment room of the salon and pointed a gun at them during the incident on August 25 last year.

“I was terrified,” she said.

“I turned away and didn’t make eye contact with him.”

The robber demanded the keys to her Audi, but after he saw them in her handbag he bent down and grabbed them himself.

“I didn’t stop him. I was terrified he would shoot us if I tried to stop him,” she added.

Beauty therapist Rachel Ferar told the jury she was petrified when the man pulled out a gun from his bag, and the CCTV footage captured her locking the front door after the intruder had fled.

She later helped police to create an E-fit image of the suspect and at an identification procedure four months later she picked out Ahmed as the robber. Ahmed’s barrister Ken Green asked her if she could have been mistaken about the identification, but she replied: “The man who I saw on the image was the man that I saw come into the salon.”

Mr Green suggested that the incident had been very short lived and he noted that from the CCTV footage it had all happened in 16 seconds.

Ahmed, of Midland Road, Frizinghall, Bradford, has denied charges of robbery, possession of an imitation firearm and taking a vehicle without consent.

A second man Mehran Ali, 25, of Harrogate Terrace, Bradford, has denied a charge of handling the stolen Audi.

Prosecutor Felicity Hemlin told the jury that the vehicle was stopped by police three days later and Ali was at the wheel.

The jury heard that false registration plates were stuck to the car and a piece of adhesive tape had Ahmed’s fingerprint on it. Ahmed said his fingerprints were on the tape because he had lent a friend, Imran Tariq, some double sided adhesive tape for a DIY project, and insisted he was “most likely at home” when the incident took place.

Ali said he borrowed the car from Imran Tariq, a neighbour of his mother, to take his mother, ten-year-old brother, and 17-year-old cousin to a car boot sale in Yeadon, when he was stopped by armed police. He said: “I had no idea it was stolen,.”

The trial resumes today with Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC summing up.