Security services filmed London bomber says BBC

LONDON - Intelligence officials secretly filmed one of the four bombers who killed 52 people on London's transport network in July the year before the attack, the BBC has reported.

Mohammed Sidique Khan, 30, featured in a 2004 surveillance operation speaking to a British-based terrorism suspect, according to the report, which cited a single, unnamed "well-placed source".

Khan and three other young Britons detonated homemade bombs concealed in rucksacks on three underground trains and a bus at about 9 a.m. on July 7.

The BBC report appears to contradict initial media suggestions that all the bombers were previously unknown to the security services.

A London police spokeswoman declined to comment. No one at the Home Office (interior ministry) could be reached for comment.

The BBC said a suspect held in connection with the 2002 Bali bombings has alleged that Khan went to Malaysia and the Philippines in 2001 to meet leaders of al Qaeda-linked group Jemaah Islamiah.

According to the BBC, the suspect said Khan trained with leaders of the group in the Philippines.

In 2003, Khan met an Islamic extremist in Pakistan who has since confessed to supplying military equipment to al Qaeda, the BBC reported.

The extremist, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is a US citizen from a Pakistani family from New York who travelled to Pakistan a week after the September 11 attacks.

Khan, a teaching assistant, and the man also saw each other together in the city of Leeds, northern England, in 2003, the BBC said.

The BBC said it had no independent corroboration that Khan was secretly filmed by intelligence services talking to the terror suspect, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

- REUTERS