Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

London terror attacks

London bomb suspect drew notice before

LONDON - Criticism of the British government grew Monday over the revelation that its vaunted domestic intelligence service did not detain one of the London attackers last year after linking him to a suspect in an alleged plot by other Britons of Pakistani descent to explode a truck bomb in the capital.

The MI5 found itself under fire as new information emerged Monday about the bombers' connection with Pakistan: Two of the suspects traveled together to the southern city of Karachi last November and returned to London in February. A third bomber went to the same city last July.

MI5 reportedly did not find Mohammad Sidique Khan - who was checked out in connection with an alleged plot to explode a truck bomb in London - to be a threat to national security and did not put him under surveillance.

The Home Office, which speaks for MI5, declined to comment on the suggestion that agents had dropped a crucial lead, or on reports that a Briton of Pakistani origin suspected of links to al-Qaida had entered the country two to three weeks before the attack and flown out the day before.

If true, "this would indeed be evidence of an enormous failure," said Charles Shoebridge, a security analyst and former counterterrorism intelligence officer.

Despite the criticism, the government has not launched any investigations into why the security services did not pick up the London bombers before July 7, when the attackers blew up three London subways and a double-decker bus, killing 56 people.

According to the Independent and other British newspapers, British intelligence reportedly found that Khan, 30, had visited the home of a man linked to an alleged plot to blow up a London target, possibly a Soho nightclub, with a fertilizer bomb.

In that investigation, detectives arrested eight suspects across southern England in March 2004 and seized a half-ton of ammonium nitrate, a chemical fertilizer used in many bomb attacks.

The eight were to go to trial this year. But given the July 7 attacks, the trial may be delayed, Scotland Yard told the Associated Press.

The best leads in the London bombings so far had come from a combination of old-fashioned detective work and modern technology, with little apparent out-front assistance from the intelligence services, Shoebridge said.

Detectives reportedly found nine bombs in a car left at a train station parking lot in Luton, the hometown of suspected bomber Germaine Lindsay. They reportedly have also seized extremist literature and computers from a residence in Aylesbury, northwest of London, and homes in Leeds, the home base for three of the suspects in northern England.

Shahid Hayyat, deputy director at Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency, said three of the London suspects had traveled to Karachi in southern Pakistan last year - Hasib Hussain, 18, last July and Khan and Shahzad Tanweer, 22, in November - but the purpose of their visits was unclear. All three were born in Britain to Pakistani parents.

Hayyat said he did not know what they did there, "but I know that our security agencies are trying to get such details."

Police in Leeds continued investigating an Islamic book shop, the Iqra Learning Centre. Tanweer and Hussain both lived in Leeds, as did biochemist Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, a former Leeds University instructor arrested in Egypt as part of the investigation.

[Last modified July 19, 2005, 01:09:13]