LONDON, July 9: A Muslim leader warned in a Portuguese newspaper interview 15 months ago that a London-based group, Al Qaeda Europe, was on the verge of a major attack.

“Here in London there is a very well-organized group, which calls itself Al Qaeda-Europe,” Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Syrian head of the London-based group Al Muhajiroun, told the Portuguese daily, Publico, in an interview published on April 18 last year.

“I know they are on the verge of launching a big operation.”

Sheikh Bakri, 46, is suspected of having links with Abu Qatada, the alleged Al Qaeda leader in Europe.

Speaking a month after last year’s Madrid train bombings, Sheikh Bakri said it was ‘inevitable’ that London would be hit by a large attack ‘because they are being prepared by various groups’.

British Home Secretary Charles Clarke had said the London attacks ‘came out of the blue’ and insisted they did not represent a failure by intelligence services.

“As far as the general threat assessment was concerned, we didn’t have prior knowledge of this attack,” he said, after questions were raised about the alertness status of the security services.

“We obviously are looking very carefully at all our intelligence to see if anything was missed but in fact we don’t believe anything was missed. It just came out of the blue,” Clarke told Sky News television.

In the newspaper interview, Bakri said the Madrid bombings, in which 10 blasts killed 191 people in four trains, were carried out by a group of independent actors who backed Osama bin Laden’s organization.

“There are many youths who dream of joining Al Qaeda, but worse than that, there are many ‘freelancers’ who are willing to launch operations similar to those by Al Qaeda,” he said.

Asked if Al Qaeda had a connection to the Madrid attacks, Sheikh Bakri told the newspaper: “Perhaps they did but the operation got out of their control.”—AFP