LONDON: British security services have yet to find a direct link between four suicide bombers who hit London’s transport network in July 2005 and a group of Islamists jailed this week for a failed copycat attack two weeks later.

Sentencing four men on Wednesday for the planned suicide bombing of three underground trains and a bus on July 21, 2005, the trial judge said he had no doubt the plot was the second wave of a coordinated Al Qaeda assault on Britain.

An almost identical attack by British Islamists had killed 52 people on July 7, 2005.

But although police and intelligence officials acknowledge there are similarities, and have discovered a link between the July 7 ringleaders and a third British bomb plot, they say clear evidence connecting the July 7 and 21 plotters remains elusive.“The bottom line is there’s no hard evidence of a connection (but) there are overlaps and parallels,” a security source told the news agency on condition of anonymity.

Security services have also played down suggestions the three plots were closely linked or that they were masterminded by Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.

Choosing the same London targets, three Tube trains and a bus, did not give a clear indication of a link, the source said.

“I suspect that having seen the approach taken on 7/7, they thought ‘we’ll replicate that, two weeks to the day’. We can’t know it with certainty. I think that’s probably the best guess.”

Britain’s security services say there are about 2,000 people in the country whom they suspect are involved with militant Islamism, in dozens of separate cells.

If they could nail down a common thread between the plots they have discovered already, they say, it would help hugely in tracking the suspects and possibly thwarting future attacks.

HYDROGEN PEROXIDE LINK: Both 2005 plots used hydrogen peroxide as the base for explosives — something British security services had not encountered before. But the authorities say that is not enough to confirm the hand of militant group Al Qaeda.

“We have no evidence at all that they met or communicated, and so we do not at this stage have any clear linkage between the two attacks,” a senior police source said.

The source said the homemade explosives had been broadly similar but there were differences, and it was impossible to tell whether the groups had been trained by the same bomb maker.

Earlier this year, British authorities did confirm a link between the four young Britons who carried out the July 7 bombings and a British cell arrested in 2004 that was plotting to carry out attacks using fertiliser-based explosives.

Spies had monitored Mohammad Sidique Khan, the July 7 plot organiser, and his accomplice Shehzad Tanweer meeting Omar Khyam, the leader of the fertiliser bomb plot. But officials concluded the links were “peripheral”.

Nevertheless, the judge who sentenced four men to 40 years each in prison for the botched July 21 attacks believes the links to the bombings a fortnight earlier are clear-cut.

“It seems to me ... their preparations were organised as part of parallel but separate teams as individual terrorist cells on July 7 and July 21, and were acting under the overall control of Al Qaeda,” said the judge, Justice Adrian Fulford.

Security analysts also tended to side with this assessment, saying it was possible all three groups were Al Qaeda sleeper cells, waiting to be activated.

One thing is certain. Muktar Said Ibrahim, the Eritrean-born leader of the July 21 group, was in Pakistan in December 2004 at the same time as July 7 bombers Khan and Tanweer.

“His visit to that country at the same time as two of those who died on July 7 was no coincidence, in my view,” judge Fulford told Woolwich Crown Court in London on Wednesday.

And Sandra Bell, director of homeland security at Britain’s influential Royal United Services Institute think-tank said it was credible the plotters were linked, either at the leadership level or through those who provided support.

Ibrahim, Khan and Khyam were likely to have gone through the same training and indoctrination regime, she said.

Meanwhile, it was also likely that Al Qaeda had a strong “domestic capability” in Britain to provide the “know-how” for attacks and a guiding hand for operations, Bell told the news agency.

“It’s unlikely that teams are formed for a single attack. It is unlikely that at one time (Al Qaeda) are only backing one plan — they probably have a portfolio of options available.”

Professor Paul Wilkinson, terrorism expert at Scotland’s St Andrews University, said the Pakistan link was significant.

“Their contacts in Pakistan were aware of what was going on. These were not totally isolated ad-hoc home-grown affairs,” he told the news group.

He said there would have been contacts through propaganda and through those with knowledge of weapons and tactics, even if it was not proven the cells were masterminded from Pakistan.

“I think we are dealing with a phenomenon that is partly home-grown and partly part of a transnational movement,” he said.

“It’s notoriously hard to get a grip of linkages.”—Reuters