Intelligence agents gave bomber the all-clear

BRITISH secret services last year vetted one of the bombers behind the London attacks and judged he was not a threat, reports claimed yesterday.

Meanwhile police continued to search for a support network of planners, bomb-makers and financiers.

The Sunday Times, citing a senior government source, said intelligence agency MI5 had assessed the eldest of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, but concluded he posed no threat and failed to put him under surveillance.

The British government refused to be drawn. “We never comment on the activities of security services,” one official said.

Investigations into the July 7 bomb attacks which tore through London’s transport system, killing 55 people, have fanned out across the world.

Police have said they expect to find clear links to al-Qaida.

Three of the bombers were young British Muslims of Pakistani origin, while the fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton. Two of them were teenagers, one was 22 and the oldest 30.

In Pakistan, security forces detained eight people from Faisalabad, Lahore and the city of Gujranwala on suspicion of links with bomber Shahzad Tanweer.

Tanweer visited Faisalabad and Lahore in the last two years. Pakistani sources say that in 2003 he met a man later arrested for bombing a church in Islamabad.

Pakistani intelligence officials yesterday said British authorities had handed over a list of telephones calls made from Tanweer’s home in Britain, to follow up.

The London Sunday Independent newspaper said police had established a link between another bomber, Khan, and al-Qaida.

It said a man who is believed to have attended an al-Qaida “summit” in Pakistan last year and who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in the United States following his arrest shortly afterwards, had identified Khan from photographs.

The Sunday Times said Khan was the subject of a routine assessment by MI5 officers last year after his name cropped up during an investigation into an alleged plot to explode a huge bomb outside a London target, believed to be a Soho nightclub.

Senior government minister Charles Falconer defended Britain’s intelligence services.

“We have got to keep our eyes all the time on what the best steps are to fight terrorism. The police, the security services, the intelligence services have been doing that effectively,” he told BBC Television.

Speaking in parliament days after the bombings, Prime Minister Tony Blair chose his words carefully, saying he knew of no intelligence “specific enough” to prevent the attacks.

Meanwhile, Scotland Yard released the first CCTV image of the four suicide bombers together, which police hope will trigger new information from the public.

The photograph, on the front pages of all Sunday newspapers, showed them walking into a train station in Luton with backpacks thought to contain the bombs they detonated less than 90 minutes later.

In Egypt, police were holding for questioning a British-trained biochemist, Magdy Elnashar, but the government said he was not a member of al-Qaida and that media had drawn hasty conclusions about him.

The 33-year-old Egyptian was a researcher at Leeds University.

Police are searching his rented house in the city, which was also home to two of the bombers.

Officers in London have been given until tomorrow to question a 29-year-old man arrested on suspicion of “the commission, instigation or preparation of acts of terrorism.”