7/7 inquests: MI5 anxiously awaits coroner's verdict

[Magda Hassan]

7/7 inquests: MI5 anxiously awaits coroner's verdict

Unprecedented scrutiny of the security service's activities leading up to the London suicide attacks

• Richard Norton-Taylor
  
• The Guardian, Friday 6 May 2011 <li class="history">Article history CCTV footage dated 28 June 2005 showing Shehzad Tanweer, left, Germaine Lindsay, centre, and Mohammad Sidique Khan, three of the four 7 July suicide bombers entering Luton train station during an apparent dummy run. It is unclear how much MI5 knew of their activities and whether they could have done more to prevent the bombings. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
  
  The coroner of the 7 July inquests, Lady Justice Hallett, will reveal today how she has responded to relatives of the victims who say MI5 could have taken steps to prevent the bombings, and the security service's insistence that it cannot be blamed.
  In more than three days of evidence at the inquests, a senior MI5 officer known as witness G made the argument, still strongly disputed by victims' families, that the security service would not have been able to halt the plot.
  The inquests heard new details of the links between Mohammad Siddique Khan, ringleader of the London suicide bombers, and Pakistan.
  Mobile phone records analysed after the bombings revealed a significant number of calls to him from phone boxes in Rawalpindi including one just five days before the attacks.
  Unanswered questions still surround the extent of those links, including the level of involvement of al-Qaida's hardcore leadership around Osama bin Laden, who was found and killed on Monday in Abbottabad, 72 miles north of Rawalpindi.
  The inquests raised four highly contentious and interlocking issues with MI5 at their centre:
  MI5 surveillance showed that at least four times that year, two of the bombers Khan and Shehzad Tanweer met another group of terrorist plotters, the fertiliser bombers arrested in 2004 in Operation Crevice.
  MI5 argues that even if it had taken steps to identify Khan and Tanweer at the time, there is no evidence the two men knew about the fertiliser plot.
  There is also no evidence, MI5 adds, that they had themselves drawn up plans for a terror attack until the end of 2004 or early 2005 when they went to Pakistan.
  Witness G admitted he had a "a high degree of confidence" that had MI5 pursued the two men, one known to them as "Saddique" who was in fact ringleader Khan, and Tanweer, they could have identified them as jihadists who trained in Pakistan four months before the attacks.
  G argued that the decision not to pursue them at the time was "proportionate and reasonable" but he said he could not explain why for reasons of national security.
  MI5 had two clear photographs of two men identified after the London bombings as Khan and Tanweer.
  Yet early in 2004 it passed only a poorly cropped one of Tanweer, rendering him unrecognisable, to a US supergrass called Mohammed Junaid Babar who might have been able to identify the future London suicide bomber.
  "I think one of my children could have done a better job of cropping out that photograph," Hugo Keith QC, the inquests' counsel told G. MI5 said better quality photographs were sent to Babar later on.
  MI5 did not provide information quickly to West Yorkshire police, notably when agents followed Khan and Tanweer, already known as associates of the Operation Crevice plotters, and their leader, Omar Khyam, in February 2004.
  West Yorkshire police also kept information from MI5. Their databases were incompatible.
  Ever since the 7/7 bombings, MI5 has argued that lack of resources prevented it following every terror suspect.
  In 2004 Operation Crevice was its top priority. It then concentrated on other known plots.
  Graham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son was killed in the bombings, told the Guardian he had seen the minutes of the executive liaison group, linking all agencies involved during Operation Crevice.
  They showed that the issue of resources was raised but never cited as a problem.
  The intelligence and security committee, made up of MPs and peers handpicked by the prime minister, was told by MI5 that it was so lacking in resources that 52 of its targets categorised as "essential" were not covered at all. At the inquests G revealed that such categories as "essential" and "desirable" targets were never used by MI5 operational officers. They were simply used in Whitehall for funding bids.
  A key to Friday's ruling is whether the coroner will use her power to make recommendations. MI5 has strongly resisted this on the grounds that it would imply that its "practices and methods of operation were defective today". It added: "On the evidence, there is simply no basis for concluding that there are any CURRENT [MI5's emphasis] circumstances, in 2011, relating to the work or practices of the security service which create a risk to life."