LONDON, 18 July 2005 — Police armed with ten new search warrants have cordoned off seven new premises in the Beeston area in Leeds, after “thoroughly searching” three other places for explosives and material evidence linking them to the London suicide bombers.
Police expect to raid many more homes as the hunt for further forensic evidence relating to the bombings and those who planned them intensifies.
A key-holder of one of the premises in Tempest Road in Beeston is thought to belong to the owner of the Islamic bookshop raided by police on Saturday. Police confirm that they are still sifting through the logistics of 800 witness statements; some 3,500 phone calls to the anti-terrorist hotline; and some 6,500 CCTV tapes confiscated in the aftermath of the bombings.
In the meantime, police have appealed to the public for any information about the movements of Hasib Hussein, who exploded the bomb on the No. 30 bus at Tavistock Square almost an hour later after the three train bombs were detonated at King’s Cross, Aldgate and Edgware Road.
Police are keen to trace the route he took from King’s Cross station, after he and his three accomplices met there after taking the short Thameslink train ride from Luton. Hussein it is believed should have been on a train on the Northern Line where he would have exploded the fourth bomb. But police are keen to establish why and how he ended up on the bus instead.
Contrary to earlier reports that the suicide bombers were off the radar screen of the intelligence services, it is now emerging that Mohammed Sidique Khan was scrutinized by MI5 last year after his name cropped up in an investigation into an alleged plot to explode a 600-pound bomb outside a nightclub in the West End. However, because the link was only “indirect” MI5 officers decided that he was not a threat to national security. In fact, Khan, it emerged, also visited the House of Commons last year as a guest of a West Yorkshire MP. His parents-in-law were guests of Queen Elizabeth II at a garden party at Buckingham Palace last year.
Jamaican-born Muslim convert, 19-year-old Lindsay Germain, the King’s Cross bomber, who attended Rawthorne High School in Huddersfield, is also attracting much scrutiny. Conflicting reports suggest that he too may have been on the intelligence radar, with the FBI linking him to a terrorist-related inquiry in the US; and with Khan in the truck bomb plot in the West End in London. Police reportedly also found nine bombs in the Fiat car which Germain used to drive down to Luton.
MI5 has come under pressure in the last few days over its alleged intelligence failure to uncover the plot to attack the London Underground and to operate a wider surveillance of Islamist radicals in Britain. However, security service sources quoted in the local media, dismiss such criticism as MI5 bashing.
