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Reda Hassaine, an Algerian journalist who worked as an informant for the British and French security services, witnessed Aswat recruiting young men at the mosque to the cause of Al-Qaeda.

“Inside the mosque he would sit with the new recruits telling them about life after death and the obligation of every Muslim to do the jihad against the unbelievers,” said Hassaine last week. “All the talk was about killing in order to go to paradise and get the 72 virgins.”

Aswat also showed potential recruits videotapes of the mujaheddin in action in Bosnia and Chechnya.

“He used to tell them look at your brothers, the mujaheddin. All of them are now in paradise living next to the prophet,” said Hassaine.

“He was always wearing Afghan or combat clothes. In the evening he offered some tea to the people who would sit with him to listen to the heroic action of the mujaheddin before joining the cleric for the finishing touch of brainwashing.

“The British didn’t seem to understand how dangerous these people were.”

Among the extremists who attended the mosque were Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber”, and Asif Hanif, a British suicide bomber who blew himself up in a Tel Aviv bar in 2003 killing three others and injuring 60.

While Aswat was closely connected with the Finsbury Park mosque, he was sent to America to meet a known Al-Qaeda activist. US investigators accuse him of being one of the “co-conspirators” of Earnest James Ujaama, who co-operated with US authorities after being charged in 2002 for planning to recruit and train jihadists in the US.

Aswat is said by US investigators to have travelled from London to Oregon in November 1999 to meet Ujaama and scout out a potential jihad training “ranch”. In the end the conspirators did not proceed with it.

There are other concerns. If Aswat knew the London bomber Khan, it would also link him to a group uncovered last year who allegedly were planning a large bomb attack. Under Operation Crevice, police arrested eight men after finding a large quantity of explosive material in a garage in west London.

During that investigation, Khan’s name surfaced on the periphery, but he was deemed no threat and not pursued. Some US investigators now claim another name also surfaced during Operation Crevice: that of Germaine Maurice Lindsay. He became another of the 7/7 bombers — and US authorities claim he was also on a watch list of suspected terrorists when he caused carnage at King’s Cross.

However, British security sources deny Lindsay’s name cropped up in Operation Crevice. And investigators say there is no hard evidence of what role, if any, Aswat played in the London attacks. Scotland Yard sources say he is not considered a priority in their criminal investigation into the July 7 and July 21 attacks. But senior Whitehall officials do not rule out the possibility there my be links to one or more of the bombers.

“I don’t think the evidence is conclusive either way,” one official was reported as saying in the US.

Senior Whitehall officials also deny “any knowledge” that he might be an agent for either MI5 or MI6.

The differences between the US and British agencies are symptomatic of a simmering distrust. Leaving aside the differences over Aswat, some aspects of the attacks increasingly point to an organising mind beyond the immediate bombers.

For five days after the first attacks, enough bomb-making material to kill scores of people sat in a car at Luton station before police discovered it. There was at least one completed explosive device and about 15 other items.

That finding remains a worrying loose end in the investigation. Why would the four bombers, intent on killing themselves, leave behind so much material in a car for which they had bought a seven-day parking ticket? A number of hypotheses are possible. The bombers may have bought the parking ticket in order not to arouse suspicion, and they may have chosen not to carry all the explosives they had prepared.

Another possibility is that the bombers were duped and had intended to return to their car. Were they told to plant their bombs in the belief they were timed to explode later than they did? Alternatively, was there a fifth bomber who dropped out at the last moment and abandoned his explosives and the car? Or was explosive material left behind deliberately for other terrorists to collect? Late last week, Scotland Yard was still refusing to say exactly what type of explosive was used in the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks on the grounds that doing so might prejudice its investigations.

But experts believe both sets of bombers used home-made explosives concocted from readily available household products.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, warned that the 21/7 attackers were not “the B team”, despite the failure to detonate their bombs fully. “They made one mistake. We are very, very lucky.”

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