US officials accused of hampering Scotland Yard terror investigation

British police were forced to prematurely swoop on suspects plotting to target transatlantic flights.

A security officer at Washington Dulles International Airport, in Virginia, warns passengers that liquids and gels are no longer permitted on flights.

LONDON // Nervous US government officials, fearful of another 9/11, forced Britain's security services to move too soon against Muslim extremists planning to blow up seven airliners over the Atlantic, the UK's former anti-terrorist chief said yesterday. Andy Hayman, who was in charge of counter-terrorism operations at Scotland Yard at the time, said the US insistence that the al Qa'eda link to the British plotters be arrested in Pakistan "hampered our evidence-gathering and placed us in Britain under intolerable pressure".

His remarks came after a jury in London found three young British Muslims guilty on Monday of planning to carry liquid explosives in soft-drink bottles on to transatlantic flights and kill at least 2,000 passengers and crew in the summer of 2006. The discovery of the plot led to worldwide restrictions being placed on liquids passengers could carry aboard flights, initially causing chaos and long delays at many airports.

Security officials remained angry yesterday that precipitous action by the United States had jeopardised an exhaustive UK surveillance operation, based around the group's headquarters in a flat in east London and costing an estimated £35 million (Dh213m). "The fact that we arrested eight men and only three were convicted - and only then after a second trial - speaks for itself," said a security source in London. "Our hand was forced and there was not enough time to get all the evidence we needed."

British security sources believe that the United States pressured the Pakistanis into the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, a militant originally from Birmingham, England, who is now thought to have played a key role in the suicide bomb attacks on London transport in 2005 that killed 52 commuters. Rauf, who fled the UK in 2002 after the murder of his uncle, arranged for some of the airline plotters to receive bomb-making training from Abu Ubaida al Masri, an al Qa'eda commander, in Pakistan in 2005.

Mr Hayman wrote in The Times yesterday that, throughout the surveillance operation in east London, Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, and George W Bush, the then-president, were kept fully briefed. "Fearful for the safety of American lives, the US authorities had been getting edgy, seeking reassurance that this was not going to slip through our hands," Mr Hayman said. "We moved from having congenial conservations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations.

"We thought we had managed to persuade them to hold back so we could develop new opportunities and get more evidence to present to the courts. "But I was never convinced that they were content with that position. In the end, I strongly suspect that they lost their nerve and had a hand in triggering the arrest [of Rauf] in Pakistan." The British had not been informed beforehand of the arrest and, when they learned about it, they were forced to move against the plotters, fearing they would disappear.

"We were being forced to take action, to arrest a number of suspects, which normally would have required days of planning and briefing," Mr Hayman said. Michael Chertoff, a former US homeland security chief, admitted yesterday that the threat from the British plotters had put the Bush administration on such a state of heightened alert that one airliner was turned back over the Atlantic two days before the arrests in August 2006 because there was a suspicion that one of the bombers was on board.

"This stood out as being [a plot] of a very substantial dimension - advanced, specific and sophisticated and of a scale comparable to 9/11," he said. Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales, described the airline plot as "mass murder on a massive scale". He also said the difficulty in getting convictions - there was a hung jury at the first trial while only three of the eight were convicted at the second - illustrated the need for wiretap evidence to be made admissible in British courts.

At present, only the UK and Ireland among western nations do not allow intercept evidence to be introduced, although Gordon Brown, the prime minister, last year ordered a review by an independent committee. Prosecutors in the UK believe they could secure many more convictions, particularly in terrorist cases, if it were permissible. "This is the best evidence you can have: people convicting themselves out of their own mouths," he told the BBC.

After his arrest, Rauf, considered to be a key link between al Qa'eda and terrorist cells in the West, escaped detention in Pakistan under mysterious circumstances. The United States believes that he was later killed in a missile attack from one of their drones operating in the tribal areas of Pakistan in November, although this has never been confirmed. Al Masri, from whom Rauf received instruction, is believed to have died of natural causes last year.

Al Qa'eda is likely to try again to use aircraft to attack the West, British government sources were quoted as saying late yesterday. Frank Gardner, the BBC's security correspondent, reported that intelligence officers believe that the foiled airline bomb plot was part of an al Qa'eda "obsession" with using commercial airliners. [e-mail]