THE Dewsbury ringleader of the 7/7 London bombing atrocity was not thought to pose a direct threat, it has been revealed.
A heavily-censored report released yesterday showed that extra checks to link Mohammed Sidique Khan to terrorism did not take place because of limited resources.
And it can be revealed that in the months before the attacks which claimed 52 lives and left dozens badly injured, surveillance agents were watching only around one in 20 terrorist suspects.
The four bombers were led by 30-year-old Khan, of Thornhill, and also included 19-year-old Jermaine Lindsay, who was brought up in Rawthorpe, but then living at Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
Khan appeared to be a quiet, mild-mannered man married with a daughter and worked with children.
Investigators did not dig further into his background despite watching him meet extremist plotters because they believed he did not pose a direct threat, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said.
In a long-awaited second report into the July 7 2005 attacks in London, MPs said they “cannot criticise” decisions made by MI5 and police in the months before the atrocities.
But they branded the fact that MI5 could only provide “reasonable” surveillance coverage of about one in 20 terror suspects in 2004 as “astounding.”
And they revealed that MI5 chiefs admitted they can do more to improve how potentially vital information on suspects is stored so it can be retrieved more easily.
The committee concluded: “Having taken everything into account and having looked at all the evidence in considerable detail we cannot criticise the judgments made by MI5 and the police based on the information that they had and their priorities at the time.
“Even considering material that was discovered after 7/7 and that which arose from the trial, we believe that the decisions made in 2004 and 2005 were understandable and reasonable.”
The heavily-censored 100-page report will leave the Government open to claims of a whitewash by campaigners calling for a full public inquiry.
They want an independent investigation into what the Security Service and police did and did not know in the run-up to the 2005 London attacks.
The report was finally published yesterday after three men were acquitted of helping the four bombers prepare for attacks on three Tube trains and a bus.
But the possible existence of a fifth person involved in the July 7 attacks was also revealed yesterday.
MI5 and MI6 told MPs an analysis of intelligence material showed there may have been a “facilitator” who was part of the suicide plot.
But they said the information about his existence came to light after the bombings took place.
Little detail about the individual is included in the report and many of the passages related to the facilitator are censored. The intelligence suggested he had links with both extremist groups and bombers Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shezad Tanweer.
The report said there was “no specific confirmed intelligence” that the person was either a fifth bomber or a “mastermind” behind the atrocities.
But MI5 and MI6 do think it likely that the bombings were directed by al Qaida groups based overseas.
The report explicitly rejects reports that a mastermind or fifth bomber left the country shortly before the attacks.
It was claimed the man, named in reports as Haroon Rashid Aswat, was protected from prosecution and allowed to leave Britain.
The MPs said: “We concluded that there was no evidence to substantiate these allegations.”
In a previous report published in 2006, the ISC revealed that bombers Shehzad Tanweer and Khan were known to MI5 but were not investigated. The report said that, given the amount of information held on Khan, it was ‘nevertheless surprising’ that they did not identify him prior to July 7.
But MPs added that they were satisfied about the reasons why MI5 did not divert resources to the suspected “small-time fraudster.”
The report found the various spellings of Khan’s name may have hindered the police and MI5 as they tried to join up all the different fragments of information they had.
