“When resources became available, attempts were made to find out more about these two and other peripheral contacts, but these resources were soon diverted back to what were considered to be higher investigative priorities,” the report said.

The man later identified as Khan had been mentioned by people detained outside Britain in 2004, the report said. “This reporting referred to men from the UK known only by pseudonyms who had travelled to Pakistan in 2003 and sought meetings with Al Qaida figures.”

The report moreover confirmed that Britain’s alert status had been downgraded from “severe general,” the second-highest, to “substantial” on May 26.

“The main reason given ... was that there was no intelligence of a current credible plot to attack the UK at that time – a group with established capability and current intent,” the report underlined.

<B>London bombings of July 7, 2005 </B>

The 7/7 bombings, the first time suicide attackers had struck in western Europe, killed 52 people and were the second-deadliest act of terrorism in Britain. The Lockerbie plane bombing of 1988 killed 270. The revelation that the bombers were disaffected British Muslims rather than international al Qaeda operatives took the security services by surprise. One of them, Shehzad Tanweer, worked in his father’s fish and chip shop and had been playing the quintessentially English game of cricket in his home town of Leeds just the day before. A widely accepted theory at the time was that the idea had been to detonate the explosives so they formed the image of a cross on the London Underground map. One bomb was in the west at Edgware Road, another in the east at Aldgate and the third in the north at Kings Cross. The plan appeared to have faltered when the fourth bomber blew himself up on a bus in Tavistock Square not far from Kings Cross. the bombings, which occurred in the morning rush hour, came the day after London was chosen to host the 2012 Summer Olympics and during a Group of Eight leading nations summit in Scotland. “Until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier.”