So familiar a sight were the Muslim men who came to Baysbrown Farm campsite and pitched tent in the highest field, just below the crags, that the Cumbrian farmer had nicknamed them “my Taleban”.

So harmless and engaging did they seem that BBC producers paid them to go paintballing, filmed them for a series called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic and regarded their leader, Mohammed Hamid, as “a Cockney comic”.

And so seemingly inept and childish were their efforts at training — crawling through streams, using sticks as pretend guns and staying out all night in the woods — that the police and MI5 surveillance teams must have wondered if the Operation Overramp terror training camps investigation wasn’t a waste of time and resources.

Any doubts about the seriousness of the group gathered around Hamid and Attila Ahmet were to be dispelled, however, in the days after July 21, 2005.

The four men who had attempted to blow themselves up on three Tube trains and a London bus, in imitation of the 7/7 bombers who killed 52 people a fortnight before, had all been on the weekends in the Lake District.

Hamid had taken two of the terrorists paintballing on July 3 and texted some on hearing news of the 7/7 attacks with the message: “We fear no one except Allah, we will not change our ways, we are proud to be a Muslim, we will not hide.”

Later investigations would show that Hamid had called or texted the 21/7 bombers at least 173 times between autumn 2004 and July 2005.

This was not Carry on Camping after all. The antics of this group represented the earliest stages in the process of selecting and indoctrinating recruits who would go on to fight jihad overseas or return to Britain as killers.

Before July 2005, MI5 watchers reported back that Hamid seemed to be interested only in sending his pupils to fight in Afghanistan and there was no indication of a direct threat to Britain.What had most alarmed the authorities about the July 2005 attacks was the speed with which junior recruits and street-corner agitators had been transformed into would-be martyrs.

The group around Hamid now had to be the subject of a much more targeted surveillance and evidence-gathering operation.

Hamid and Ahment had been watched intermittently since 2004, but the assessment that they posed no direct threat meant that closing down other terror cells engaged in the final stages of planning attacks took precedence.

There also had to be parallel legislative changes. In 2004, Hamid’s group were doing nothing illegal by engaging in mock military training in the Lakes and the New Forest. The Terrorism Act 2006 would introduce offences relating to terrorist training, encouraging terrorism and acts preparatory to terrorism.

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