MI5 chief defends torture criticism

Director-general Jonathan Evans said British lives had been saved as a direct result of intelligence received from overseas agencies in the years following the 9/11 attacks in the United States.

Speaking at a private event at Bristol University to mark MI5's centenary, he said they would have been "derelict in our duty" if they had not worked with foreign agencies in countering the threat from al Qaida.

Mr Evans acknowledged that contacts with agencies in countries with standards and practices "very far from our own" had posed "a real dilemma" for the service, but insisted he had "every confidence" in the way his officers dealt with them.

His comments come at a time when MI5 is facing a series of claims through civil courts that it colluded in the mistreatment of suspects held overseas, as well as an unprecedented investigation by the Metropolitan Police.

While he could not comment directly on the allegations, he said that it was "a very clear and long established principle" that MI5 did not collude in torture or solicit others to torture on its behalf.

However he said that events in the aftermath of 9/11 had to be seen in the context of the times, when the UK and other Western countries were faced with a terrorist threat that was "indiscriminate, global and massive".

"Now, eight years on, we have a better understanding of the nature and scope of al Qaida's capabilities but we did not have that understanding in the period immediately after 9/11," he said. "We had seen nearly 3,000 people killed in the US, 67 of them British. We were aware that 9/11 was not the summit of al Qaida's ambitions. And there was a real possibility that similar attacks were being planned, possibly imminently.

"Our intelligence resources were not adequate to the situation we faced and the root of the terrorist problem was in parts of the world where the standards and practices of the local security apparatus were very far removed from our own."

The dilemma MI5 faced was whether to work with those security services which had experience of dealing with al Qaida on their own territory, or risk cutting off a potentially vital source of information that could prevent attacks on the West.