MI5 checked out suspected London bomber: report

British intelligence officials opened a file on one of the suspected London suicide bombers last year but decided he posed no real risk, a report has said as the huge investigation into the attacks spread further around the globe.

According to the Sunday Times, the domestic intelligence agency MI5 made routine checks on Mohammad Sidique Khan as part of an investigation in 2004, but decided he was not a sufficient threat to be put under surveillance.
Police believe the 30-year-old classroom assistant was responsible for one of three bomb blasts on London Underground trains on July 7, at Edgware Road station just west of the city centre, in which he and six others died.

The MI5 probe focused on an alleged plot to blow up a 270 kilogram truck bomb outside a target in London, an unnamed senior government official told the Sunday Times.

Britain's Home Office had no immediate comment on the claims.

MI5 is said to have discovered in 2004 that Khan had been visiting a house used by a man who met one of the suspected plotters, but decided that as he was "indirectly linked" to the affair he posed no risk.

"We've only got finite resources. You can only concentrate resources on those people who are a direct threat to national security," the official told the paper.

Nonetheless, the revelation is potentially embarrassing for police and intelligence services, who had previous insisted none of the four suspected bombers had previously known terrorism links.
At least 55 people died in the three Underground bombs and a fourth that detonated on a packed commuter bus.

With the suspected bombers dead, the massive police investigation is largely focusing on who might have helped the men plan the attack and build their rucksack-borne bombs.

The hunt has spread around four continents, with considerable focus placed on Pakistan, from where the families of three of the four suspected bombers originated.

On Saturday, security officials in Pakistan told AFP that two of the men - Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, and Shehzad Tanweer, 22 - arrived together in the country last November and returned to Britain earlier this year.

Hasib Hussain, 18, also travelled separately to Pakistan at an unknown time last year, according to the officials.

On Sunday, the Israeli newspaper Maariv claimed that Khan had additionally gone to Israel two years ago to help plan a suicide attack in Tel Aviv.

According to the paper, Khan is suspected of organising the bombing in a Tel Aviv pub in 2003 in which three people were killed when Briton Assif Mohammed Hanif blew himself up.
The final London bomber has been named by police as 19-year-old Germaine Lindsay, a Jamaican-born Muslim convert who is thought to have caused the single most deadly blast, between King's Cross and Russell Square stations.

According to British diplomats in Jamaica, Lindsay's father Nigel, 45, had been interviewed by local police at the request of London officers
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A further strand of the investigation is in Egypt, where Magdy Mahmud Mustafa Nashar, formerly a doctoral student in chemistry in Leeds, the home city of the three Pakistani-British bombers, was arrested on Thursday.

He was identified by some newspapers as being the suspected bomb-maker, although Egyptian officials have dismissed this.

Police warned on Saturday that given the massive size of the investigation it could take a long time to complete.

Officers have so far searched 10 addresses in and around Leeds and one elsewhere and taken 800 witness statements. They are studying some 6,000 security camera tapes.

"Further detailed analysis will take many months of intensive and detailed investigation," a police statement said.

The Observer newspaper, meanwhile, said on Sunday that senior police officers feared it could take decades to successfully infiltrate radical Muslim groups and stop further attacks.

Police sources compared the situation to that in the early 1970s when Northern Ireland's Irish Republican Army paramilitary group began attacking targets in mainland Britain, the paper said.
-AFP

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200507/s1416040.htm