LONDON (Reuters) - The government is closely monitoring hundreds of possible terrorism suspects as it tries to thwart future attacks after July’s deadly London bombings, Home Secretary Charles Clarke said on Tuesday.
Summoned before a parliamentary committee, Clarke and Britain’s top policeman Ian Blair both defended the police’s "shoot-to-kill" policy, criticised since officers killed an innocent Brazilian electrician they mistook for a bomber.
The government has introduced a string of measures to tackle terrorism since four British Muslims killed themselves and 52 others in suicide bombings on three underground trains and a bus on July 7. Two weeks later four bombers failed in an attempt to repeat the attacks when their devices failed to explode.
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"There are certainly hundreds of people who we believe need to be very closely surveyed because of the threat they offer," Clarke said.
Police chief Blair told the same committee some small changes had been made to its so-called "shoot-to-kill" policy after a brief review following the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, gunned down by officers on an underground train. But he said the policy should, in principle, remain.
"There is no question that a suicide bomber, deadly and determined, who is intent on murder, is perhaps the highest level of threat that we face and we must have an option to deal with it," he said. He has resisted calls that he resign pending a full-blown investigation into Menezes’s killing.
London mayor Ken Livingstone said he was looking into ways of making the underground safer but that airport-style security could not work, partly because there was not sufficient space.
He said in the next five years he intended to double the number of surveillance cameras on the underground and that all buses would be equipped with closed circuit television by the end of the year.
"We are on alert and watching to see if anyone can develop sniffer technology for the underground," said Livingstone.
Clarke, who is due to reveal new details of new government anti-terrorism proposals later this week also said he supported the use of lethal force where necessary.
FOREIGN LINKS PROBED
He said police were investigating the exact links between the London bombers and foreign militants, as part of a probe that has cost 60 million pounds.
"The extent to which there was some kind of command and control we don’t know at the moment, but we are trying to find out precisely what that relationship is," he said.
Police initially said the bombings bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda, but have found no evidence of links to the organisation.
Italy’s highest appeal court on Tuesday upheld the extradition to Britain of one of the suspected bombers in the failed attacks.
Ethiopian-born Hamdi Issac, also known as Osman Hussein, was seized in Rome a week after the July 21 attacks.
Asked if the July 7 attacks were the result of intelligence failure, Clarke said the government had intelligence but no specific advance warning of the bombings.
Britain’s intelligence chiefs have come under fire for reducing the al Qaeda threat level from "severe - general" to "substantial" in June, after a general election in May.
Britain had boosted security services’ resources and recruitment, said Clarke. Authorities were also trying to work more closely with intelligence networks in other countries.
