MI5 Plans 200 Extra Counter-Terrorist Officers to Tackle Home-Grown Threat

Britain's MI5 will soon employ twice as many counter-terrorist officers as the police, after an injection of extra money from the Treasury last month.

The Security Service, headed by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, is to recruit another 200 intelligence officers to cope with a rising threat from home-grown terrorists.

Security sources said that MI5 was engaged in the biggest counter-terrorist surveillance operation in its history because of the increasing emergence of a radical element prepared to resort to terrorist attacks in this country.

Crispin Black, a former government intelligence analyst and author of 7-7 What Went Wrong, said, "The reason why MI5 didn't get Mohammad Sidique Khan (the leader of the suicide bombers) before July 7 was because it had to prioritize about who to follow."

During a previous counter-terrorist operation, when Khan's name came up he was not subjected to long-term surveillance because he was considered to be on the periphery of the suspect terrorist plot.