British secret services last year vetted one of the bombers behind the London attacks and judged he was not a threat, a report said today, as police searched for a support network of planners, bomb-makers and financiers.
The Sunday Times, citing a senior government source, said intelligence agency MI5 had assessed the eldest of the bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, but concluded he posed no threat and failed to put him under surveillance.
The government refused to be drawn. "We never comment on the activities of security services," one official said. Investigations into the July 7th bomb attacks which tore through London's transport system, killing 55 people, have fanned out across the world.
Police have said they expect to find clear links to al Qaeda. Three of the bombers were young British Muslims of Pakistani origin, while the fourth was a Jamaican-born Briton. Two of them were teenagers, one was 22 and the oldest 30.
In Pakistan, security forces have detained eight people from Faisalabad, Lahore and the city of Gujranwala on suspicion of links with another of the bombers, Shahzad Tanweer. Tanweer visited Faisalabad and Lahore in the last two years.
Pakistani sources say that in 2003 he met a man later arrested for bombing a church in the capital, Islamabad. Pakistani intelligence officials said on Sunday British authorities had handed over a list of telephones calls made from Tanweer's home in Britain, to follow up.
The Sunday Independentnewspaper said police had established a link between another bomber, Khan, and al Qaeda. It said a man who is believed to have attended an al Qaeda "summit" in Pakistan last year and who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in the US following his arrest shortly afterwards, had identified Khan from photographs.
The Sunday Timessaid Khan was the subject of a routine assessment by MI5 officers last year after his name cropped up during an investigation into an alleged plot to explode a huge bomb outside a London target, believed to be a Soho nightclub.
Senior government minister Lord Falconer defended Britain's intelligence services. "We have got to keep our eyes all the time on what the best steps are to fight terrorism. The police, the security services, the intelligence services have been doing that effectively," he told BBC Television.