MI5 did not follow 7/7 ringleader tip
Intelligence service officer tells inquest that he can't explain why agency did not follow lead, for reasons of national security
MI5 could have identified the ringleader of the 7 July attacks as a trained jihadist four months before the bombings, it has admitted, but for reasons that it refuses to disclose it decided not to investigate a crucial piece of intelligence.
A senior security services officer told the inquests into the atrocity that he had "a high degree of confidence" that had agents chosen to investigate information in March 2005, that two men called Saddique and Imran, from Batley in Leeds, had trained in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, they would have identified Mohammad Sidique Khan as one of the men.
Khan, from Batley, was the leader of the suicide bomb plot in July 2005, in which 52 people were killed on the underground and a London bus.
A decision was taken not to pursue the lead, however, for "proportionate and reasonable" reasons, said the man, who is giving evidence anonymously as Witness G, but the explanation "cannot be disclosed" for national security reasons.
The source of the information supplied a surname for Saddique. It has not been released but the surname was not Khan.
"So you could have found out who Saddique 'not-Khan' was but for good reason no steps were taken in that direction?" asked Hugo Keith QC, lead counsel to the inquests.
"I have a high degree of confidence that we could have done," said G. He added, however, that even if Khan had been identified it would have linked him only to activity up until August 2004.
"But if this person had been identified as Mohammad Sidique Khan and he had come under intensive surveillance thereafter, then there would have been a greater chance that whatever he was plotting might have come to light," said Keith.
"Yes, a greater chance," replied the witness, but this would have required "such a degree of surveillance which would not have appeared to be proportionate".
Th e inquests have already heard that at this stage the security services had a number of pieces of intelligence linking Khan to extremists or plotters, including during investigation of the "Operation Crevice" fertiliser-bomb plot, and through West Yorkshire police surveillance linking him to known extremists.
It meant, suggested Keith, that the "greatest chance" of identifying Khan "came not through Crevice or from West Yorkshire, but from a single strand of intelligence that could have identified him as capable of carrying out a martyrdom operation?".
Witness G replied that he felt the greatest chance had come from an informant, Mohammed Junaid Babar, who had given separate intelligence about two men with different names whom he had met with other militants in Pakistan.
The inquests heard on Monday that a surveillance photograph of Khan and another of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer, was edited so as to remove Khan and render Tanweer unrecognisable, before being shown to Babar.
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