LONDON, July 11: Britain is investigating how the ringleader of a failed 2005 London bombing plot, identified as a possible terrorist, went to Pakistan for terror training, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday.
Brown confirmed reports of the investigation after it emerged that Muktar Said Ibrahim, who was convicted along with three other defendants, had made the trip barely six months before the attacks, although he was on bail.
The new prime minister said there were three aspects which needed to be probed about Ibrahim, who had previous convictions as a youth. He had also been monitored as a possible terrorist threat before the July 21, 2005 botched bombings.
“The first is when he was guilty of crimes in Britain in the early 1990s and later 1990s,” he should have been deported under new legislation, Brown said.
“The second thing is he applied for a passport, he applied for citizenship of this country, and received citizenship because all his offences as a juvenile had been wiped off,” he said.
“That would not happen now and he would not get citizenship of this country. And I’m looking very carefully at the circumstances that surround his visit to Pakistan,” he said.
Woolwich Crown Court in London heard during the trial that Ibrahim travelled to a militant training camp in Pakistan in December 2004.
He was there at the same time as Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the four British nationals who later blew themselves up on the London transit system on July 7, 2005, killing themselves and 52 commuters.
The July 21 attempted attacks came exactly two weeks later, but failed after the explosive devices — as on July 7.—AFP
