(AFP) - The US Central Intelligence Agency warned the British government in 2003 about one of the suicide bombers who launched attacks in London two years later, according to a new book by a US intelligence specialist.
The CIA warned that Mohammed Sidique Khan, the oldest of the four London bombers, was that year planning attacks on synagogues on the east coast of the United States, according to author Ron Suskind, in comments published in Monday's The Times newspaper, reports Trend.
The four coordinated attacks on the London transport system on July 7 last year left 56 people dead and 700 more injured.
The bomb which Khan detonated killed seven people including him. Investigators believe the 30-year-old teacher was the leader of the young Islamic bombers, three of whom were of Pakistani origin, the other Jamaican.
A British intelligence official told The Times that the claims were untrue and "one of the many myths that have grown up around Khan".
The claims come in Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine, which The Times is serializing.
"British intelligence has certainly been told about Khan in March and April 2003," Suskind told the paper, insisting that the dossier sent to London was "a very detailed file."
Khan was banned from flying to America two years before the attack in London, according to the book.
Suskind also claims that Dan Coleman, who led the FBIs investigation into Al-Qaeda, had read detailed files of Khan's many telephone calls and e-mails, beginning in 2002, to a number of US based al-Qaeda-trained militants living in New York and Virginia.