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U.K. probes whether 7/7 bombings were preventable

12 October 2010 03:37 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. A British judge opened a detailed investigation Monday into the killing of 52 people in suicide bombings on London underground trains and a bus on July 7, 2005, APA reports quoting CNN.
Justice Heather Hallett is probingwhether the secret service or police could have prevented the attacks, which were carried out by British-born bombers backed by al Qaeda.
It’s not clear whether MI5 officials will testify in public or in private.
Hallett said Monday she had not decided whether it was within her powers or in the interests of justice to hold closed-door hearings.
Five potential witnesses have requested anonymity, she said.
She is expected to spend about six months on the investigation, which will also examine the emergency services’ response to the blasts that threw London into chaos during the morning rush hour.
She will probe whether emergency responders were influenced by the fear of secondary explosions, and sophisticated computer models will show what injuries victims would have suffered based on where they were sitting in relation to the bombs.
The investigation will hear from relatives of the victims, survivors, London Underground staff, police, and emergency services personnel.
The probe -- known formally as a coroner’s inquest -- follows criminal and parliamentary investigations, and could not begin until the police investigation was complete.
Two of the bombers, including ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan, were trailed by security services for a year before the attacks, according to a report released last year by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).
Entitled "Could 7/7 have been prevented?" the report said that domestic intelligence service MI5 considered Khan a "small time fraudster" and "minor criminal" and did not link him to potential attacks within the U.K. at that time.
John Reid, the home secretary at the time of the attacks, said the four bombers -- three British males of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican-born man -- were young "radicalized" Muslims whose motivation was "fierce antagonism to perceived injustices by the West against Muslims" and a desire to become martyrs.