Ilyas Street is in one of Lahore’s better neighbourhoods. No 13, known as the
Sufi House, used to be one of its more desirable addresses. There was some
consternation among local residents when, after her husband’s death, the
owner converted the property into a hostel for students and travellers.
The neighbours were even more annoyed when a group of noisy foreigners –
“English boys” – took rooms in the house in the summer of 2003.
The group left early every morning. When they returned after dark they would
gather outside in the courtyard, talking noisily, playing music and keeping
the neighbours awake.
These young men were no ordinary students. They had come to Pakistan to study
violent jihad with al-Qaeda instructors specialising in explosives, firearms
and urban terrorism. Among those with bookings at the Sufi House that summer
were two of the most significant Islamist terrorists that Britain has
produced.
One was Omar Khyam. The other was Mohammad Siddique Khan, 32, from Dewsbury,
West Yorkshire, who, The Timeshas learnt, gave immigration officers
the telephone number of the Sufi House as his contact point on arrival in
Pakistan that summer.
Two years after that trip, on July 7, 2005, Khan led Britain’s first suicide
bomb cell, which killed 52 innocent people on London’s transport network.
The mass murder may have been prevented had intelligence agencies picked up on
the trail of clues and connections that identified Khan as a terrorist in
the making.
The Times has been told by high-ranking officials in Pakistan’s Inter
Services Intelligence agency (ISI) that they twice alerted their British
counterparts to the activities of the Sufi House group.
A high-ranking ISI official said: “There is no question that 7/7 could have
and should have been stopped. British agencies did not follow some of the
information we gave to them.”
Mohammad Siddique Khan, or MSK as he has become known in counter-terrorism
circles, and Omar Khyam were similar young men: intelligent, resourceful and
angry at the ills – both real and imagined – perpetrated against Muslims
around the world.
Both had had attended terrorist camps before they met at Islamabad airport in
July 2003, on their way to the same jihad training expedition. One of the
most significant figures in their group was Mohammad Junaid Babar, a US
citizen of Pakistani descent.
Babar was the Mr Fixit, the man who found lodgings, arranged transport, raised
money, bought equipment and sourced the ingredients for homemade explosives.
Although his mother had narrowly escaped death on 9/11, Babar, from Queens,
New York, had pledged his life to the jihad.
But from the moment he was arrested in New York in April 2004, Babar agreed to
cooperate with the authorities to avoid a 70-year jail term. At the trial of
Khyam and his codefendants, he became the first al-Qaeda supergrass to
testify in a British court.
Babar had known neither man by his real name. He called Khyam, whom he first
met in London in 2002, by the name “Ausman” and knew Khan as “Ibrahim”. But
he knew what they looked like, where they came from and what they were
doing.
In Ilyas Street the neighbours also had their suspicions, and called police
after hearing a series of late-night explosions. One woman said: “We knew
what they were doing and we were afraid at those boys being here, but we
couldn’t do anything about it.”
The group told police that a propane gas cylinder had exploded. The officers
alerted their superiors, who ordered a surveillance operation.
The authorities became aware that the group had travelled to the mountainous
Malakand region, where al-Qaeda maintains training camps and compounds. Abd
al-Hadi al-Iraqi, the al-Qaeda commander who was transferred to Guantanamo
Bay last week, directed their training and attack planning.
Intelligence sources in Pakistan claim that the group was taught how to
manufacture and detonate homemade explosives using ammonium nitrate and
aluminium powder.
In Lahore members of the group were observed making regular visits to the
Gohar Centre, an office complex where the extremist group al-Muhajiroun and
other terrorist affiliates rented space.
Pakistani intelligence sources told The Times that they reported their
concerns to British agencies because they were satisified that the group was
not a threat to Pakistan but was intent on carrying out attacks back in
Britain.
Khan returned to Britain in August 2003. By this point his mobile telephone
number had already appeared in an investigation into a man called “Q”, who
lived in Luton, Bedford-shire, and was using Khyam and others to courier
money to Mujahidin groups in Pakistan.
MI5 officers had traced the number of the prepaid phone to a “Siddique Khan”,
but finding no reference of him in their own records or on the Police
National Computer they pursued the lead no farther.
A month after Khan’s return, Khyam arrived back in Crawley and began
preparations for a huge bomb attack.
A big surveillance operation involving police and MI5 was mounted in February
2004.
Codenamed Operation Crevice, the investigation involved every available police
and MI5 surveillance team in southern Britain and targeted homes, phones,
cars and people.
Dozens of people were watched and on four occasions Khyam and another man were
seen, photographed and taped in the presence of two men unknown to the
watchers.
It was not until after the July 7 attacks that MI5 realised that the unknown
men were Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, the Aldgate Tube bomber.
The bombers met Khyam three times in February 2004 and once more on Sunday,
March 23, a week before he and his associates were arrested. Khan was also
in regular phone contact with Khyam.
Khyam’s Suzuki Vitara Jeep was fitted with a listening device that picked up
conversations about fraud, terrorism and martyrdom. MI5 insists that none of
the unidentified men spoke about bombings.
The four men were also seen together in a green R-registra-tion Honda Civic,
which was not bugged. After one meeting, the car was followed north to Leeds
and then Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Its ownership was found to be registered
to Hasina Patel. She was Khan’s wife, but at this point the connection was
not made.
After Khyam and his associates were arrested a second check was made on the
ownership of the Honda. This time, the registered owner had been changed to
Siddique Khan.
For reasons that remain unexplained, no one at MI5 made the connection to the
Siddique Khan whose mobile phone number had already cropped up. Nor,
according to reports, was West Yorkshire Police Special Branch informed that
they had one or more potential terror suspects whose movements should be
monitored.
Once Khyam and his associates were in police custody it was left to MI5 to
decide how to proceed against 55 other individuals in the inquiry.
Of those, 15 were classified as “essential targets” and the remaining 40 –
including Khan and Tanweer – as “desirables”. Security sources say that the
7/7 bombers had, at that time, shown no intention of taking part in
terrorist activity. They were regarded as “below the threshold” and not
placed under surveillance.
Within weeks of the Crevice arrests, surveillance officers were diverted to
another big operation involving a leading al-Qaeda planner. Any plan to
track the unidentified northerners was put on the backburner.
A security source said: “Our whole aim was to stop the Crevice plot, and we
had hundreds of names, so we had to keep an operational focus. We believed
MSK, at that stage unidentified, was involved in criminal activity. We’re
not the Stasi. We can’t investigate every individual.”
A batch of surveillance pictures was sent to the US to be viewed by Babar, the
supergrass witness. But MI5 judged the quality of the Khan images – a
black-and-white closed-circuit television image and a colour photo taken
covertly – too poor to be included. Sources claim that Scotland Yard sent
pictures of Khan. They were shown to him by the FBI but he did not recognise
Khan.
Yet after 7/7, when he saw Khan’s face on television, Babar recognised him as
a man he had met in Pakistan. He said: “That’s Ibrahim.”
MI5’s decisions left Mohammad Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer free. For six
months they kept their heads down. Then in November 2004 they flew together
to Pakistan and made their way back to Abd al-Hadi’s al-Qaeda camps. There,
they were groomed to be suicide bombers, encouraged to recruit other
“martyrs” and taught how to make the explosives that would kill and maim in
London on 7/7.
Key meetings
On four occasions in early 2004 two of the plotters were under surveillance in
the company of two “unidentified northern males”. Only after 7/7 did MI5
realise that it had had Mohammad Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer – two of
the London suicide bombers – in its sights
February 2 Officers watch Khan, Tanweer, Omar Khyam and Shujah Mahmood
meet at Toddington services on the M1 after arriving in separate cars.
Photographs are taken of the four men. Officers follow Khan’s car, a green
Honda Civic, back to West Yorkshire
February 21 Khan and Khyam are covertly recorded speaking in the
latter’s Suzuki Vitara.
Khan “Are you really a terrorist?”
Khyam “They are working with us. I am not a terrorist, they are working
through us.”
Khan “There is no one higher than you.”
Khyam “I do not live in Crawley anymore. I moved out because in the
next month they are going to be raiding big time all over the UK.”
Khan is also recorded saying: “We may as well rip this country apart
economically as well. All the brothers are running scams. All the brothers
that are leaving are doing it.”
Khan and Tanweer may then have attended a key meeting at a house
at The Hollows, Crawley. MI5 is unsure exactly who went into the house
because they had technical problems with their listening device as the house
was in a cul-de-sac backing on to a railway line
February 28 Kran, Tanweer and Khyam are again spotted in Khan’s car.
Khan is taken into a building supply shop to be shown how to open a
fraudulent account. Financial crime is a frequent topic of conversation. At
one point, Khan says: “I’m going to tap HSBC, if not I’ll just go with a
balaclava and a shotgun.” They attend a meeting, involving about ten people,
with a former prison imam called Bishrat Ali. Mr Ali was later arrested but
released without charge
March 23 The men are photographed alighting from Khyam’s car and later
going into the student flat of another of the Operation Crevice suspects.
According to court documents, secret until now, Khan “was debating whether
to say goodbye to his infant child before he left the United Kingdom”.
Security sources say that may have been a reference to going to fight in
Afghanistan
