A GROUP of senior MPs is to re-examine how MI5 handled intelligence about two of the July 7 suicide bombers after it emerged the security services had known about them long before the atrocity.
The fresh probe by the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee comes in the wake of the conviction of five men yesterday over a plot to explode a huge fertilliser bomb in the UK.
It emerged that MI5 tracked two of the July 7 bombers
during the investigation into that case, but took no action.
They dismissed ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer as peripheral figures and failed even to tell the Special Branch in West Yorkshire where Khan lived of their findings.
Around 15 months later, Khan, Tanweer and two other men would go on to kill 52 people in the London attacks.
MI5 today claimed it had done all it could and Home Secretary John Reid dismissed claims for a full public inquiry. But today the chairman of the ISC - former Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy - said the investigation would be re-opened to look again at why the 7/7 bombers were not picked up.
It will also look at why the Special Branch in West Yorkshire were not kept up to date with the MI5 surveillance operation on the fertiliser bombers despite the fact that Khan lived in Dewsbury in their area.
Mr Murphy said that the committee - made up of senior MPs picked by Downing Street - would look at why it was told Khan was not "named and listed" but he said that the information at the time was that he was not fully identified "until after he died" in the Tube suicide attack. MI5 is under heavy questioning over the fact that it said at the time that the London Tube terrorists were "clean skins" whose attack came "out of the blue". But in fact they had tracked, bugged and photographed Khan and Tanweer during four meetings with Omar Khyam, the leader of the fertiliser bombers in the final stages of the plot.
Khyam was then one of Britain's top terror targets but his close association with Khan was ignored.
The Dewsbury man was tracked to his mother-in-law's home in Dewsbury and it was established that Khyam occasionally travelled in his car. Both had attended a terror training camp together in Pakistan two years before.
One of the survivors of the 7/7 attacks, Rachel North, said she was shocked and appalled to learn that two of the killers were known to MI5. She said: "Now that we have discovered these men were very much on the radar of the security service and could have been stopped, that is going to be difficult to come to terms with.
"This has fuelled my desire for an independent inquiry because it appears we have not been told the truth about what happened."
But Dr Reid dismissed the calls for a public inquiry saying it would not be "the correct response" adding: "It would divert the energies and efforts of so many in the security service and police who are already stretched greatly in countering that present threat.
"Our responsibility as a government is to try and minimise the chances of any other group of families ever having to suffer as the families of 7/7 did suffer."
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell said the trial would spark "widespread public concern" about the capability of MI5 and the reliability of government information after 7/7.
And Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: "Whether deliberately or not, the government have not told the British public the whole truth about the circumstances and mistakes leading up to the July 7 attacks."
The full article contains 634 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
