Light was shed yesterday on the extent of the missed opportunities that allowed the organizers of the July 7, 2005, London bombings to slip through the security net, after five of their associates were jailed for life.
Two of the suicide bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, were under surveillance by UK security service MI5 almost 18 months before the four simultaneous attacks that claimed 52 lives.
MI5 officers followed the pair as they drove hundreds of kilometers around the UK, photographed them and recorded their voices. They followed Sidique Khan to his mother-in-law's home, made inquiries about his telephone, and listened to bugged conversations in which he talked about waging jihad.
Yet they failed to identify either man and cut short their investigation into the pair after deciding that they did not pose as high a risk to the country as other suspects being investigated.
The revelations provoked MI5 into an unprecedented public defense of its role.
Details of the security service failings were finally made public yesterday after five men were convicted of plotting a series of massive blasts in the southeast of England using bomb-making techniques learned at al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan.
Omar Khyam, 25, Waheed Mahmood, 35, and Jawad Akbar, 23, all from Crawley, West Sussex, were convicted of conspiring to cause an explosion likely to endanger life or injure property between January 1 2003 and March 31 2004.
Anthony Garcia, 24, from Ilford, Essex, and Salahuddin Amin, 32, from Luton, were convicted of the same offence.
Amin, who has repeatedly said he was tortured after being arrested in Pakistan, is planning to appeal.
It also emerged on Monday that one of the gang's associates, Kazi Rahman, 29, was jailed for nine years last year after he admitted a charge of trying to purchase weapons.
Khyam's brother Shujah Mahmood, 20, and a seventh defendant, Nabeel Hussain, 22, were cleared.
Opposition members of parliament immediately called on Home Secretary John Reid to explain why the government claimed in the aftermath of the July 7 attacks that the four bombers were not known to MI5.
Reid resisted the call, but said the all-party Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) would look again at the matter.
Survivors of the attacks demanded that any future inquiry should be public.
Jonathan Evans, the new director general of MI5, denied that the organization was in any way complacent.
"The attack on July 7 in London was a terrible event. The sense of disappointment felt across the service at not being able to prevent the attack [despite efforts to prevent such atrocities] will always be with us," he said.
On the MI5 Web site yesterday, the security service published a detailed allegation-by-allegation rebuttal of its handling of intelligence in the run-up to July 7.
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