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Tale of 'missed opportunities'
19 May 2009Today's report listed a succession of “missed opportunities” when 7/7 ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan came into contact with police or MI5 before the London bombings.
The most important occasions were four different meetings involving Khan - who at the time was known only as an unidentified Pakistani male - Omar Khyam, the ringleader of a 2004 plot to blow up Bluewater shopping centre and Ministry of Sound nightclub using fertiliser bombs.
The car driven by Khan was twice followed back to Leeds by MI5 officers, but after checks were carried out on the registered owner and addresses linked to the car nothing of significance was found and no further action was taken.
Conversations involving Khyam and Khan were also recorded but today's report states that at no point was Khan present when the Bluewater plot and other attacks in the UK were discussed. It says that instead the conversations related largely to financial fraud and that given the imminent threat posed by the Bluewater plotters, who were arrested in April 2004 and subsequently convicted, priority was rightly given to following up those involved in active attack planning.
Today's report also clarifies an earlier claim that photographs of Khan and Tanweer, who was also present at some of the meetings with Khyam were not shown to a “supergrass” in custody in the US who could have identified the pair as having been present at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
An earlier report by the Intelligence Security Committee said that the failure to show the supergrass one such photograph had been a “missed opportunity” but today's document says that has since emerged that the pictures were, in fact, examined by the detainee who failed to identify either of the 7/7 bombers.
Today's report also exposes that two phone numbers called by the Bluewater plotters were linked to Sidique Khan but that the connection between these records, the cars and other intelligence were not made until after 7/7, partly because police believed the name Sidique Khan could have been an alias because of the multiple spellings and lack of other traces on data bases.
