MI5 HAS rejected allegations that it could have stopped the 2005 Tube and bus bombings in London, but acknowledged that the plot’s ringleader should have been targeted earlier because of his known links with extremists, the London inquest into the attacks has been told.
Giving evidence anonymously, the chief of staff to the intelligence agency’s director general said it was “nonsensical and offensive” to allege that MI5 had failed to take steps to prevent the terrorist attacks, which left 52 people dead and scores injured.
Illustrating the scale of the challenge facing the security services, the chief of staff, identified only as Witness G, said the number of investigations into possible Islamic fundamentalist attacks had jumped from 250 in 2001 to 800 by 2005, and even more today.
The agency’s resources had increased substantially after the 2001 September 11th attacks in the United States, but he said it still had “to prioritise ruthlessly” to “hit the crocodiles nearest to the boat”.
He conceded however that more should have been done to identify the leader of the attacks, Mohammed Siddique Khan, who, it emerged later, had been involved with another Islamic cell who had tried to set off fertiliser bombs.
In a review of all security intelligence after the July 7th bombings, cars and addresses used by Khan were noted eight times by security service agents investigating the 2004 plot, but the information was not passed on to the West Yorkshire police.
Saying that MI5’s resources had increased since the bombings, the official was asked if computer systems now in place would allow the agency to cross-reference the information it holds with police forces: “It might do,” he replied.
One photograph taken in 2004 showed Khan and Tanweer, but it was cropped, removing Khan’s image, before it was shown to an informant, Mohammed Junaid Babar, in April 2004, who was by then in United States custody.
The informant failed to identify Tanweer.
Initially, the coroner, Lady Justice Hallett, ruled that the press and the public, including members of the bereaved families, should be excluded from the hearing, although some family were subsequently allowed in on condition that they did nothing to identify the MI5 officer.
The families, however, remain furious that the inquest did not demand to question an MI5 officer who had been involved in the investigations in 2005, saying that yesterday’s witness could not answer their questions.
One of the bereaved, Mr Graham Foulkes, whose son David (22) died in the Edgware Road bombing, said: “The person who was running anti-terrorism from 2004, the person who is an expert in Islamic terrorism, that person should be the one giving evidence today.
“Instead they are putting up somebody else who has nothing to do with any of it. I just fail to understand it. The person we want to hear from is still alive and well and working for MI5, so why send a substitute?” he asked.