MI5 bungle meant 7/7 ringleader was missed

MI5 missed an opportunity to identify the July 7, 2005, London bombing ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan as a terrorist by failing to show a key informant a clear photograph of him, the inquest into the 7/7 attacks heard yesterday.

Undercover surveillance officers took a sharp colour picture of Khan and his deputy Shehzad Tanweer at a motorway service station in February 2004.

But MI5 did not use this photograph of Khan and provided only a very badly cropped image of Tanweer to US investigators interrogating al-Qaida supergrass Mohammed Junaid Babar.

Babar had met Khan when the British extremist attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2003, but he was not able to identify him until after the July 7, 2005, attacks on London.

Hugo Keith QC, counsel to the inquest, said his children could have done a better job of cropping the picture of Tanweer than the MI5 officer who prepared the image for sending to America. A photograph of Khan was also edited but it was never shown to Babar — apparently because the quality was so poor.

MI5 said it cropped the image to avoid revealing details about its covert methods and the location where the picture was taken. The agency also stressed Babar was a new source and they did not know how far he could be trusted.

The black-and-white, blurry cropped versions of the picture prepared by the Security Service show only Khan’s right half, while most of Tanweer’s nose is cut off and his stubble and the letters on his hat cannot be made out.

One of MI5’s most senior officers told the inquest there was no record of why the image was edited like this before being shown to Babar. The top spy — named only as Witness G — is chief of staff to MI5 director general Jonathan Evans and expressed “profound regret” for the security service’s failure to prevent the bombings but insisted the agency had “no inkling” of Khan’s plot.

The inquest heard MI5 and the police had four separate strands of intelligence about Khan and Tanweer before the 2005 attacks.

Counter-terrorism officers watched, photographed and followed the pair in early 2004 during an inquiry into a group of extremists planning a fertiliser bomb attack, but did not fully identify them at the time.

Separately, West Yorkshire Police received intelligence in January 2005 that a committed extremist called “Saddique” from Batley, West Yorkshire — where Khan once lived — had undergone training in Afghanistan.