The Rest Is Classified - 63. Terror Strikes London: What did MI5 know? (Ep 2)

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Fifteen months before the London bombings, MI5 had seen them. They had names, photographs, and addresses. Two of the men who would carry out the 7/7 attacks had already appeared in surveillance. And then… they vanished back into the noise. In this second episode of our 7/7 series, 20 years on from the attacks, David and Gordon unravel one of the most haunting questions of the entire investigation: could the 7/7 bombings have been stopped? Through forgotten files, garbled intelligence, and missed opportunities, a chilling pattern emerges - one where small decisions, fractured systems, and scarce resources combined to let something slip through. Follow the threads of Operation Crevice, eavesdropped conversations, and badly cropped photographs. Watch as one name - Mohammad Sidique Khan - surfaces again and again, just beneath the surface. The dots were there. But no one connected them. ------------------- To sign up to The Declassified Club, go to www.therestisclassified.com. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restisclassified It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Breaking news we're getting from the PA Newswire that there's been reports of an explosion outside Liverpool Street station. Well, there may be fatalities. We need ambulances at all sorts of hospitals to King's Cross. So, moving back please! Most Londoners actually are not going to be afraid by this. I think they're going to continue their daily business.

We considered the attack last week on British soil an attack on the civilised world. And what we are confronting here is an evil ideology. It is not a clash of civilisations. All civilised people, Muslim or other, feel revulsion at it. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail. It might be argued by some that MI5 should put everyone they came across under surveillance, gathering intelligence on them until they were sure they did not pose a threat. Had MI5 put unidentified men C, D, and E under surveillance for the next 15 months, it is

very possible that they would have heard them talking about their plan to bomb London and they could have stopped them. Well welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And that was a quote from a 2009 report by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament called Could 7-7 Have Been Prevented? And that, Gordon, is exactly the question we're going to look at in this episode. So last time, just to refresh our dear listeners' memories, last time we looked at

what happened on the day of July the 7th, 2005 itself, this massive terrorist attack across buses and the tube in London. We looked at really, I think the first few days of the investigation to identify the four British suicide bombers who had conducted the attack. And I think within a couple of days, we left on this cliffhanger last time,

it became apparent that MI5 knew of the bombers, a few of them. Now, I guess that phrase is a bit of a complicated one because they're on sort of on their radar, but what does that actually mean? And I think really, I mean, the question we'll be looking at in this episode is if MI5 had come across two of these bombers before, could something different have been done to prevent these horrific attacks? Yeah, that's right. And it's a really difficult, really thorny question. It's one that's been looked at by inquests and oversight committees. And one of the problems is the story kind of comes out in drips due to revelations, court cases, inquiries, which also makes it feel like something's been hidden. And it is a complicated story. We're not going to get into the weeds of it. But I think some of the detail is important because it gets to that question

of could it have been prevented? But it also, I think, does quite a lot to explain what the reality of counterterrorist investigations are really like and what the challenges are when you're trying to deal with these terrorist groups and surveillance. So we talked last time about how the security service emergency room at MI5 were handling all the leads. They're coming into this conference room. They're arriving in big blue crates. It is hard to remember. It's a more low-tech time. It's not yet the era in which everything is digitized, scanned, and on big databases. So it's often

photocopies of identity documents which are being sent in, and then it's being inputted in spreadsheets by hand, if you like, from paper onto big spreadsheets. There's not some single big database in which to look things up. And I guess, I mean, it's 2005, so we're still a couple years away from the iPhone. Yeah. Right. So most people presumably don't have anything resembling a smartphone. And you don't have the equivalent in MI5 of Google where you just put one name in or one, what they call a selector, like a phone number or a name.

Put it in, and then just pops up everything you know about that person. You've got lots of separate databases to see if there's a match. There's no facial recognition software at this point either. So when you get a picture of someone, you're often getting a photocopy and you're having to then take that by hand or photocopy it again and hand it out

to agents to say, do you recognize it? And they're building network diagrams. And in this emergency room, one person's job is to be on top of the overall picture or narrative and update it constantly so that everyone knows that the bigger picture. And we update it constantly so that everyone knows the bigger picture. And we left it last time with them finding that in their databases they've got hits effectively. They find references to two of the bombers, Mohammed Sadiq Khan, often known as MSK, the ringleader, and also Shahzad Tamweer. And they're actually going to find, and I think this is

what's going to surprise people, multiple pieces of intelligence that they've got about him, but which were, if you like, separate. And you're bound to ask at this stage, aren't you? Did you miss something? Yeah. So the biggest set of leads on Mohammed Sadiq Khan or MSK came from this investigation, which was codenamed Crevice. And Mohammed Sdiq Khan actually appeared with the Crevice plotters a number of times. Now, Crevice in itself is a really interesting story. It begins in early 2003. MI5 gets intelligence that an individual from Luton

in south of England was the leader of a facilitation network for al-Qaeda in the UK. So that means helping al-Qaeda by sending money and equipment to Pakistan and Afghanistan, but not actually at that point it's thought planning an attack in the UK. And these were Britons whose families had come from Pakistan originally. Then in late January 2004, they identify one man, Omar Khayyam is apparently a courier, they put him under surveillance. February 2004, surveillance of this courier, Omar

Khayyam, he drives to Crawley in the south, Honda Civic parks alongside his car, Khayyam gets into that car, drives for 45 minutes for a meeting with one person, while the other three who came stay in Khayyam's car, they all go back into their original cars and drive off, looks a bit suspicious. This is under surveillance. So at a service station on the motorway, an MI5 surveillance team photographed, secretly, the three men in that Honda car who've met with the courier. And they are going to be called C, D, and E,

unidentified males, UDMs, C, D, and E. And then these three people are housed, which is like a technical term in MI5, which means you follow them to the address where they go next, just to get the details of that in case you need it for later investigation. Now they don't know at the time, but D was Shehzad Tamweir and E was Mohammed Sadiq Khan, so two of those 7-7 bombers. And people get out the car in Leeds and Dewsbury and the car parks at 10 Thornhill Park Avenue. The address of the registered keeper they check

is a woman called Haseena Patel. They check her out. They find nothing. She'd actually married Mohammed Sadiq Khan, but their marriage hadn't been registered with civil authorities. So they don't actually, at that point, have MSK's name attached to this investigation.

Exactly. Yeah. And it's a really interesting point because people would say, well, you had Mohammed Sadiq Khan under surveillance. Now, they didn't have him under surveillance in the direct sense. And then they've seen him come up in that context of the al-Qaeda facilitator. And this is a pretty shady meeting. Yeah, it's definitely a shady meeting. And it's shady enough that MI5 have photographed Mohammed Sadiq Khan and have followed him to a house, but that's it. Then, February, so just after that, this Operation Crevice changes dramatically

because suddenly they get new intelligence, which I think comes from the US, that the group is planning actually to attack the UK. So this was thought to be a facilitation network. Now they think they're planning to make a bomb out of fertilizer. And the Korea, the facilitator is heard actually discussing targets, mass casualty targets, a shopping center. On February 20th, 2004, an electronics expert arrives from Canada to help build detonators. And that same day,

and this is, I think, interesting, the police anti-terrorist hotline gets a phone call from a member of the public at a storage depot saying that someone's been storing a 600 kilogram bag of fertilizer. And they think it's suspicious. I think it's kind of interesting, isn't it, that actually a public tip is vital in this in this case to identify it also reminds me of the tip off against the French DGSE team in Auckland for Rainbow Warrior. If listeners remember those episodes were pretty much the only reason that a subset of the French team was identified was that the public public that someone saw the

camper van they were in and thought it was a little bit strange and then called the authorities. So this kind of, you get a whole bunch of garbage that floods in from these public tip-offs, but in some cases they do prove extremely vital. And this is definitely one of them because this is going to turn Crevice into MI5's top priority investigation at this point in 2004. So remember, we're still more than a year before the 7.7 bombings, their biggest counter-terrorist operation. They visit the storage unit, and then MI5 replace the fertilizer there, that 600 kilogram bag,

with something inert without the group knowing. So they've minimized that threat, but they can't be sure that they haven't got more somewhere else. They've basically swapped it out. And they're basically, at this point, making the trade-off of if we can essentially make the explosives not explosive, we can continue without much fear to watch this network to see how far the tentacles go out and who's involved. And it's really interesting because I think this

always is the question with these counter-terrorist investigations is when do you move to arrest? Yeah. Now MI5, remember, is gathering intelligence and the police do the arresting, so they have to kind of coordinate it between them. And there's always a tension there because you want to arrest them to stop them doing something, that's obvious. But also if you're going to prosecute them, you need enough evidence, then that's going to take time. And that might require more watching. And secondly, the more you watch them, the more you can gather intelligence about who else they know, are there any other plotters,

what's the network like. So there is a kind of inherent tension about when you move to arrest, as opposed to just collect intelligence, I think, on this. Do you think that once the explosive was discovered, and the fact that the guy who ends up becoming NSK is effectively kind of off the radar of the investigation. Do those two things kind of happening almost within a few months of each other mean that MSK is just kind of lost in the shuffle here?

Not entirely, because he's going to come up again, what's interesting is in this Crevice investigation. So on the 21st of February, just after the tip-off, there's a farewell meal for the bomb maker and MI5 are trying to carry out surveillance. Some men are in a car which is bugged by MI5 and they try and transcribe the talk but it's a bit hazy what they can get. But there seems to be conversations about fraud and about travel to Pakistan for training, some kind of activity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Mohammed Sadiq Khan is one of those in that conversation, but they still don't have his name yet. But the view is that that conversation, again, which is suspicious, but it's not about planning an attack in the UK still,

so it's not yet a top priority, then there's more surveillance like a week after that of someone in Crevice and they see the same Honda car they'd seen earlier with these men, CD and E, and there's a 500 mile round trip they do from the north of England, south of England, then back again, which again is just suspicious, just clear for some kind of meeting. And they now check the car and they now see it's registered to a new name, a Sadiq Khan of 11 Gregory Street Batley. An MI5 surveillance team stays with the Crevice plotters, but then a police team follow these unidentified men back to West Yorkshire. They're talking to the West Yorkshire police about them now. There's more meetings in March with surveillance officers, still not

identified the men fully. There's a conversation at the end of March with someone about the success of the Madrid bombings which have just happened and people are talking about, isn't it amazing it led to a change of government in Spain. So only later will it turn out that one of the people in that conversation is Shehzad Tamweer, another one of the 77 bombers, but it's not quite clear yet. But then March 2004, Crevice, this existing counter-terrorist operation comes to a head because they think that the group are getting jumpy. There's talk they might be thinking about leaving the country.

They fear that might be because they want to leave the country after hurrying to do an attack. So at that point, the MI5 and police move against the crevice plotters. So they're going to move against that group, which they thought was going to use the fertilizer bomb to carry out the attack. They're not going to go to trial for some time after 7-7, so the details aren't public. But they've arrested them.

And then you crucially get this point, which is, OK, we've got them out of the way. Let's look at their contacts. Look at who's left. Yeah, let's look at who's left. Yeah, let's look at who's left. And at this point, do they know MSK or Shazad Tenor's name? Do they even have the names? I mean, they have they have MSK's

wife's address. Yeah. They've also, for instance, got Sadiq Khan for one of the cars. So they are they've and MI5 is asking the local police up in this Leeds area for further inquiries on the addresses and the cars and the names, but they don't quite, the names are a bit different. And as they're starting to work through the contacts of the Crevice investigation, and they've got I think 4,000 telephone contacts to look at, but then another group comes up. So you get another big counter-terrorist operation. So you've cleared Crevice, then you get a separate one called

Operation Rhyme. I remember this one as well, which was the summer of 2004, which was a group of pretty serious al-Qaeda plotters planning attacks with limousines or big cars packed with gas cylinders, maybe even dirty bombs. So now suddenly this takes up most of MI5's resources. This becomes the priority. And once they're arrested, August, I think 2004, you then get a load more contacts, which MI5 got to work through to check out well, who of their contacts are dangerous. So what you can see is each new operation and set of arrests, it's throwing up more contacts, and then pushing, working through the older contacts, down the list if you like. So basically MI5 are playing catch up at this point.

In the Bin Laden series, right, we talked a lot about how the path to eventually finding him after 9-11 led through this one courier. And there is this kind of slow process of going from the courier's war name to his true name to a family phone number to his like, so you kind of go through this methodical thing. In retrospect, it all seems very clear and maybe somewhat obvious. But I think in this case, maybe not giving MI5 enough credit

to sort of look at it in retrospect and say, well, look, these future seven-seven bombers here in 2004 are kind of up to some pretty shady stuff with another group that looks to be conducting attacks in the UK. You can almost spin it to look maybe almost obvious. They should have been looked at more closely. But the reality at this time is all of the work that MI5 is doing, it's a resource decision of like, how do we take limited scarce resources and use them and point them at the most direct threats? And you'd have to say looking back at this, I think that it's not at all obvious

that these guys should have been maybe higher on the list. It's interesting in one of the oversight reports, it says in 2001 MI5, you have about 250 primary investigative targets by July 2004. So about this time of the Crevice arrest, that's gone to 500. By the time of 7-7, it's gone to about 800. So they've got a lot of investigative targets. And Jonathan Evans, who's later head of MI5, tells the oversight committee,

they can only hit the crocodiles nearest the boat. You imagine you're in the boat and crocodiles are snapping, you're just basically hitting the ones which are nearest. And the priority is to go after people who look like they're planning attacks in the UK against the UK. And then that pushes down other contacts further down the list. Now I think the one criticism, which I think is fair, is it makes sense to look at the ones who are planning attacks, but the harder thing is to look at what if someone is on a journey towards planning attacks?

And effectively, they're looking at people and prioritizing people who they can say, right now, we see evidence that they are planning an attack on the UK. They go to the top of the list. Everyone else goes further down. But I think they're not prioritizing. And I think they accept this. One of the witnesses from MI5 in the inquest says, you know, we weren't sufficiently considering people who were on a journey to move up towards attack planning, you know, and that was where the resource issue comes up. And what it means is, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and Shazad Tamwai are not themselves investigative targets for top surveillance or to be investigated. investigative targets for top surveillance or to be investigated. There are contacts who MI5 is kind of looking at and saying to the police,

do you know anything about these guys? They're on the list, but they're not priority targets. Right, and they're not really under surveillance. No, people have followed them, but only because they've met someone who is under surveillance, if you like, rather than them being classified as surveillance targets. But it is true, right, that, and again, this is counterfactual, but if they had been prioritized differently and put under proper surveillance,

it is true that the 7.7 attacks probably would have been prevented, right? Because they would have seen the preparations ongoing and then done something similar to Crevice where they disrupt the bomb making. And that was that quote you read at the start from the Intelligence Security Committee which basically says if they'd been under continuous surveillance, these men who are known as CD&E, for the 15 months from Crevice until 7-7, then yes you would have spotted them, but the report goes on to say to do that level of surveillance on someone where you didn't have the

indications they were planning an attack, you'd need a very different organization. You'd need a much bigger MI5 which operated in a different way. So I think that's one of the questions which I think comes up from this is if you wanted all of the targets to be put under surveillance and to still be under surveillance for months even before they're spotted as planning an attack, you need a much more intrusive and larger security service than we had at the time. We didn't have that. And would you want that as well? It's kind of an interesting question. But maybe there to tease that would be a Pakistan connection here that is going to emerge over the course of this investigation. Let's take a break and we come back. We'll see how some intelligence supplied maybe by the Americans and also becomes key into breaking open this

Pakistan connection to the 7-7 bombings. See you after the break. Hi everyone, Millie Bright and Rachel Daly here from the Restless Football Daily Brightness. With the Women's Euros underway, we want to tell you how we'll be covering the Euros and all the games this summer and also what it means to have a little bit of daily brightness in your life. For those of you that don't know, myself and Millie were part of the England team that lifted the Euros in 2022 and we'll be giving all insights and detailed information about what life is like in camp and what the girls may be experiencing this summer.

We will be discussing all the big stories that come out of this summer's tournament and we'll be cheering on England as they look to defend their title. We'll also talk about our lives outside of the game and what we get up to, whether it's DIY, time on the golf course, highs and lows of football and the challenges that we face and things that we are eternally grateful for. It's going to be an incredibly exciting summer and we'd love you to join us and come along the journey with us. Just search the rest of this football daily brightness wherever you get your podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and also follow us on Instagram and TikTok. Well, welcome back. We have looked at how Mohammed Sadiq Khan aka MSK came up in this MI5 investigation known as Crevice. But there were also Gordon, I think some other intelligence

leads weren't there that I guess peeling them back will help us understand the dynamics behind the 7-7 plot. Yeah, that's right. So you had them come up in the context of Crevice, but you get these other leads. Again, quite complicated, but quite important, because there's a set of leads that two extremists called Ibrahim and Zubair attended a terrorist training camp in in Malakand in Pakistan with the Crevice plotters in 2003. Now that intelligence actually comes from the US and it comes from a man called Junaid Babar, who's a jihadist who's in US custody and who's talking. And after the crevice plotters are arrested,

he starts providing information to the FBI, which then they they pass to London. And he talks about going to the airport to pick up some individuals associated with a crevice plot who are going to a training camp and while they're at the airport in Islamabad they meet two other individuals and this is this Ibrahim and Zubair and they're being met by someone else but they all have breakfast together. So there's a sense that there's question mark about who these people are and photographs are shown to Junaid Babar to see if he can identify who those people might be,

because you want to know who they are and it's interesting if they're going to a camp. And there's, you know, sources saying they're coming from West Yorkshire, which is where some of the plotters have come from. It's also a second detail news providing some of this information. So Junaid Babar, this guy in US custody, is shown a photograph of Shahzad Tamweer and also kind of Mohammed Siddiquan at Toddington Services, which is the one taken on the motorway, that first time in the crevice plot, you know, where they've been followed back, these under-identified men in their car, they'd stopped at the service station, they'd been photographed by MI5. But the photograph he's shown is really badly cropped.

It's the surveillance photograph. And it's weird because it's really badly cropped. And Sadiq Khan has actually been cropped out of the picture, and only half of Shazam Tamwiz faces is there. It's a really bad quality picture, and it's badly cropped. It's not entirely clear why. I mean, maybe for security reasons, they didn't want to show where they'd taken the surveillance protocol or how, and so they'd cropped it because

you're showing it to someone abroad. But it does seem like a mistake. Defeats the purpose of putting the photo in front of the jihadist US custody, right? If it's badly cropped. So he doesn't spot from these pictures, and he's actually shown a better picture again in August 2004. But again, he doesn't spot that these pictures, and he's actually shown a better picture again in August 2004, but again he doesn't spot that Mohammed Siddiq Khan is one of the people he's been talking about. And it is significant because, you know, this is a training camp in Pakistan where people are being trained to carry out attacks. There's an attempt to identify him, but Junaid Babar doesn't identify Ibrahim as Mohammed

Siddiq Khan, even though he's shown a photograph. Now there is an interesting fact, because after 7.7, he's shown a photograph from Mohammed Sadiq Khan. He goes, oh yeah, that's the guy. And I think that is one of the interesting questions is, is it because he's now seeing a better quality photo after 7.7, or was he withholding the fact that he did know who it was beforehand, and now he's dead because he's dead in a bombing after 7-7. He's like, it doesn't matter if I kind of give him up. That's another one of the leads.

There's other leads as well. Don't want to get again lost. So that's sort of a missed opportunity here though, because I guess at this point, MI5 doesn't have, oh, we've got this guy MSK, Hamasidikan, who was in a car with the Crevice plotters who are planning an attack in the UK. And oh, by the way, he's also gone to a training camp in Pakistan. Where we know people are being trained for tanks.

Because if you have both of those things, he probably goes way up on your priority list. He goes up your list. And there's other leads as well. MI5, in the start of 2005, get some more intelligence that someone by the name of Sadiq, but the surname isn't Khan, from Batley in West Yorkshire, had been trained in Afghanistan in the late 90s and was an extremist and had been to the gym, and they traveled to Pakistan in 2001. And it's odd because the reports say no investigative steps were taken for what MI5 would say are good reasons, which can't be disclosed in open court. Find that odd. Maybe some other person is identified. But

you know, that's another strand which is there. I should say that the names, the spellings, transliteration, it's I think impossible to overstate how complex that may just searching databases for individuals, right? Because you think about it, if you're an MI5, if you're at how complex that may just searching databases for individuals, right? Cause you think about it, if you're an MI5, if you're at the FBI, if you're at CIA, and you're trying to search for an individual, oftentimes the same person's name could be entered

three, four, five different ways in systems. It can be misspelled, it can be mistranslated, mistransliterated. So it's like, it's a really complicated process. If you're taking Pakistani names or Syrian names, Iraqi names, to be sure that you're talking about the same person. Yeah. And it's a it's a administrative bureaucratic thing. Yeah. But it's so critical to being able to match up. It's about like the dot

connecting. Yeah, right. Exactly. You have to be able to do that with the same name. And I think that happens a lot here with Sadiq, Sadiq, you know, Sadiq, lots of different spellings. There are other strands of intelligence as well. There's a group of 40 men in 2001 observed by police at a training camp in the UK. Stills are produced from it. They're shown to sources. Nine of the four are identified, but one who wasn't was Mohammed Sadiq Khan. There's also some intelligence linked to a bookshop, which was a meeting place for extremists. You know, another extremist is being followed and he seemed to give a lift in a car registered to a Sadiq Khan, but that contact is only for three minutes and it wasn't considered significant at the time.

So you've got all these other little references, after the fact will be clear they were all about M. Mohammed Sadiq Khan but at the time they're not put together and so what you do have is you've got MI5 having multiple hits for the same guy in the systems but effectively under different names or under no names or as an identified male and it's not clear that they're all about the same person. Now, if they'd had the resources and the time, it's a bit like your career point with Bin Laden. Eventually, you could probably resolve those and work out it is the same person and connect. You could do anything with more resources and more time. I think it's worth saying there are some structural failings.

I don't think MFI had enough local coverage at the time. It's building up regional stations at this point, but it's not really embedded in local communities. It's relying on local police forces. And here the relationship was not as joined up as it should be. While they've got quite a good relationship with Scotland Yard in London, with local police forces, there's a process called

task and complete. So they send a task out to West Yorkshire police saying, look up this name, tell us if you find anything. But they're not telling West Yorkshire police the context for that. Right. And I'm sure the West Yorkshire police loved getting those requests. Yeah, from MI5. You can imagine what it's like. MI5 want this and they're not telling us why they want this or what the context is. And they want it right now. So they're just told, have a look at this house and this car. And so you do get this sense of a lot of leads, but not being put together. And so there is a criticism from the judge in one of the inquests, which is that you have got someone who is associating with attack planners,

who is talking about going to Pakistan for extremist activity. You know, these are worrying indicators, but they never quite reach the threshold for MI5 of, this is someone who we know is planning an attack in the UK and therefore should be pushed up the list. Now, you can question whether they should have been pushed higher based on those fragments and whether if they'd resolved

all those little pieces of intelligence, they'd have worked out, hang on a sec, this guy is interesting. He's at the center of lots of little webs and different groups. I think that is the question. That is part of the problem, right, is that he is on, I guess at this point in 2004,

he actually appears from MI5's perspective to be sort of on the fringes of a bunch of interesting groups, but not at the center of anything they're looking at. And so I guess you could almost have this perspective of like, oh, there's like faint dots here and there, but it is hard, I think, to judge in retrospect whether should they have been connected. It feels judge in retrospect whether should they have been connected. It feels maybe unfair to say definitively, the cropping of the photos feels like an obvious Yeah, there were definitely mistakes. Yeah, right. Definitely

clear mistake. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is if you had put him under surveillance in 2004, what would you have seen Mohammed Siddiquan? You might have seen someone who's an extremist. But you wouldn't at that point have seen someone planning an attack in the UK, reason being that he wasn't at that point in 2004. Crucially, he's going to go to Pakistan November 2004. Now after 7-7, police are actually going to find a video where he says goodbye to his daughter before departing for Pakistan, making clear he doesn't think he's coming back. So even if you'd seen him under surveillance at that point, you'd have thought, well, this

is a guy who's going out to maybe fight and die in Pakistan or Afghanistan. And then you have a separate question, which is can MI5 get that information to SIS? But through 2004, at this point, there isn't the sign yet that he is planning an attack in the UK, because it doesn't look like he is. So the crucial thing is what happens in Pakistan, because that is where the transition is going to be made for someone who was a jihadist, but wasn't planning an attack in the UK to someone who then decides they're going to be a suicide bomber and attack the UK. someone who then decides they're going to be a suicide bomber and attack the UK. And so maybe there Gordon with Pakistan set up is this crucible for Muhammad Sadiq Khan's calculations about when and where he will conduct an attack. Let's end and when we come back next

time we will look into that issue of the role that al-Qaeda played. And just a reminder of course that if you want to hear the whole of this series on 77 as well as bonus episodes including material related to it you can sign up at therestisclassified.com for the Declassified Club but for everyone else we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. Hello everyone it's Gary Lineker here from The Rest Is Football. Just a quick message to tell you all about the Club World Cup tournament that's taking place in the US at the moment. It's 32 of the best teams from all around the world battling it out to be crowned the

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