February 22, 2008	Friday	Safar 14, 1429

LONDON, Feb 21: British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said on Thursday that the bugging of a lawmaker as he twice visited a friend in prison suspected of terror offences broke no laws or codes of practice.

However she announced a review of the codes which regulate conversations between lawmakers and their constituents with a view to putting them on the same confidential footing as talks between lawyers and their clients in terms of surveillance.

Member of parliament Sadiq Khan was “monitored by surveillance” as he visited Babar Ahmad, who is awaiting deportation to the United States accused of running a website raising funds for the Taliban and Chechen separatists in the 1990s.

But Smith said a report by Britain’s surveillance watchdog Christopher Rose had found that Khan, a lawmaker for the ruling Labour party, was “not the target” of the surveillance.

None of the senior police in charge of the surveillance knew Khan listed only as a friend of Ahmad on official records was a lawmaker, she added.

The report found that warrants for surveillance of visits to Ahmad were correctly authorised and the correct procedures followed, Smith said.

She also said the bugging in 2005 and 2006 had not breached the Wilson doctrine, a convention which bars the tapping of lawmakers' telephones named after then premier Harold Wilson who outlined it in the 1960s.—AFP