Police and MI5 had the ringleader of the July 7 London attacks, Mohammad Sidique Khan, on their records six times before the attacks but he was never identified as a threat, a long-awaited parliamentary report revealed today.

The intelligence and security committee (ISC) detailed a string of occasions when the bomber’s name was recorded – all but one of them because of links to other individuals being investigated over extremism.

The ISC said that in the course of its second review of the intelligence it had uncovered new information that even MI5 had not connected together before.

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But the committee concluded that having looked at all the evidence in “considerable” detail, “we cannot criticise the judgments made by MI5 and the police on the information that they had and their priorities at the time”.

The 102-page report said that MI5 had put Khan and fellow bomber Shehzad Tanweer under surveillance after they were seen associating with a group plotting fertiliser bomb attacks in London and the south east, “it is very possible that they could have heard them talking about their plan to bomb London and they could have stopped them”.

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