A BRITON believed to have been enlisted by Mohammed Sidique Khan to take part in the terrorist attack on London last July is still at large.

The man, of Pakistani origin and a close friend of the leader of the July 7 terrorists, is being kept under surveillance and has been questioned, although police do not have sufficient evidence to charge him. They believe that he lost his nerve before Khan finalised his plot.

Senior officers who have spent the past year investigating Khan’s relationships think that the man was one of the original group of militant Muslims approached to join the cell. He visited Pakistan about the same time as Khan and his fellow bomber Shehzad Tanweer, between November 2004 and February last year, and is understood to have attended a jihadi training camp, where al-Qaeda teaches volunteers to handle explosives.

It is thought that Hasib Hussain, 18, replaced him at late notice. Some officers believe that this is one of the reasons why only three of the bombers — Khan, Tanweer and Jermaine Lindsay — made a detailed reconnaissance trip to London on June 28 last year.

The man, who has an address in Leeds, is understood to have been a member of Khan’s inner circle, which met at the Hamara youth club, in the Beeston area of Leeds, and the Iqra radical bookshop.

Others in Khan’s circle, which included a former Royal Marine commando who converted to Islam and a number of graduates, have also been questioned. Police said that these other men were not connected to the July 7 plot.

Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said yesterday that the investigation into the attack continued at “enormous pace”. He admitted that there was frustration at the lack of charges, but said: “We have not given up. That is why we have a very large investigation.”

Sir Ian said that the terrorist threat was very grim and would likely continue for several years. “Since July the threat has palpably increased,” he told the BBC Today programme. “There is no doubt about it, there are people in the UK planning further atrocities.” He added that an attack was likely to happen.

Sir Ian disclosed that three further serious plots had been prevented, and that 60 people were awaiting trial for terrorist offences, the highest number in any country.

Andy Trotter, the Deputy Chief Constable of the British Transport Police, told The Times that he did not believe that the bombers had acted alone. He said: “Can it really be true that these people were doing what they did without anybody else knowing? We need to be able to get information and intelligence from within the community.”

Police and intelligence services are still working closely with foreign security agencies, including Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence. Security officials in Pakistan said that they still did not know whether Khan and Tanweer had met Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, during their last visit to the country, but were certain that the men attended one of the group’s camps. They believe that Abu Hamza Rabia, al-Qaeda’s main bomb-maker, taught them. He was reportedly killed in a US airstrike in Waziristan last year.

In the video of Tanweer’s last testament, released on Thursday, al-Zawahiri is seen taking credit for al-Qaeda in orchestrating the attack.

Al-Qaeda released more of the video last night. On the video, posted on a website used by insurgents, al-Zawahiri said that Tanweer and Khan had been trained at one of the organisation’s bases. He said that they then returned to Britain and sent the country “into a spin”. An unidentified voice on the video also suggests that the men had planned the bombings while at their camp.

Pakistani sources have said that although they have given the British authorities the names of a number of Britons who were trained at some of the same camps as Khan and Tanweer, they have not been able to trace all the “English Muslims” there at the time.

They said that a number of these recruits left Pakistan for other countries, including Somalia. Pakistani officials are trying to trace the hundreds of phone calls the bombers made to Pakistan. Almost 300 calls have been traced, but most were made from public call centres, making them impossible to track. Authorities in Islamabad insist that the bombers were radicalised in Britain.

CITIZENS’ BLOGS

There’s a good chance [the bombers] won’t achieve anything other than generating anger towards extremists. Britain will not become an Islamic state, the US and Israel won’t change policy, the Middle East situation won’t be resolved. In the war against being ruled by fear, we’ve won already. (The other wars our governments involved us in may take more time and are less easy to classify as any good result.) The message to extremists from the British public remains the same: “Still Not Afraid.”

Steve’s Journal http://tyrell.livejournal.com

London loses 216 people to road accidents each year. How many people die from smoking each year? 52 seems a very small number compared to that. Yet we have the War Against Terror and the mass hysteria that goes along with it when I feel we should really have the War Against Smoking, the War Against Poverty and a ton of other “Wars” which will save a lot more lives . . . for the same price we’re paying for a war that is divisive and largely unnecessary.

Voices from the Pulpit http://angusabranson.livejournal.com

While we think about those people a year ago whose lives were ended or forever altered through the actions of a small group of maniacs; while we ponder what life must be like in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan and the Sudan, where events like 7/7 come almost daily; while we think how grateful we are to have got through it — think also about how little we know about that day and events leading up to it, and call for a public inquiry.

J Clive Matthews http://europhobia.blogspot.com/2006/07/obligatory-one-year-on-post.html

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