The first indication that pro-Al Qaeda terrorist elements were planning a major terrorist strike in London came in August last year following the arrest in Lahore by the Pakistani authorities of one Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani computer expert, who used to live partly in London and partly in Pakistan. During his interrogation, he admitted that he was working for the Al Qaeda as a communications expert and that he used to transmit all messages from Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders in a coded form to the Al Qaeda cadres in different countries. He also reportedly told the Pakistani authorities that the Al Qaeda had planned a terrorist strike at the Heathrow airport in London.
On the basis of the information given by Noor Khan, the British authorities arrested Dhiren Bharot alias Bilal, a Hindu convert to Islam, and 11 others, seven of them of Pakistani origin. Noor Khan was reported to have told the Pakistani authorities that Dhiren, who was also known as al-Brittani, was the leader of an Al Qaeda cell in the UK and had in the past been sent by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad of the Al Qaeda, who had orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US, to the US to select suitable economic targets in New York for attack.
The British did not give details of what they had ascertained during the interrogation of the arrested persons, but gave out that their interrogation did not corroborate the Pakistani version of a planned terrorist strike in Heathrow.
Investigations made by the intelligence and security agencies of West Europe after the Madrid blasts of March, 2004, revealed that the Al Qaeda had a large number of supporters in the Muslim diaspora of West Europe. In its annual report on the action against terrorism in Europe, the EU had also drawn attention to this fact. Morrocans and Pakistanis constituted the largest number of terrorist suspects arrested and questioned in West Europe last year. About 70 Muslims from the UK, many of them of Pakistani origin, were estimated to have gone to Iraq last year and joined the local Al Qaeda unit headed by Abu Musabal-Zarqawi.
Following the reported participation of one of them in a suicide mission, the British Police had recently made some arrests in the UK, but they have not revealed the identities of those arrested.
Thus, the British authorities were apparently aware of the presence of suspected Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the Muslim diaspora in the UK and had been closely monitoring their activities for nearly a year. The fact that despite this, the perpetrators of the blasts managed to carry them outunderlines their motivation and ability to plan and execute terrorist strikes in total secrecy.
In response to a request from a US security consultancy group asking for my comments on likely future scenarios in the US homeland, I had stated as follows on June19, 2005: