MI5 saw Westminster attacker Khalid Masood as threat in 2010, agent tells inquest

Westminster Bridge attacker Khalid Masood was identified as a “threat to national security” in 2010 after he was linked to al Qaeda operatives going to Pakistan for terror training, a senior MI5 official said today.

Masood first appeared on the radar of the security service in 2004 when his telephone number was on a contact list of a jihadist behind the so-called fertiliser bomb plot in Crawley.

His name came up again in February 2010 when MI5 was investigating UK-based jihadists plotting to travel to the semi-autonomous tribal areas of Pakistan for training. Officers were passed “vague” information that a Saudi Arabia-based man called Khalid Masood was helping the extremists, the inquest heard.

Giving evidence this morning, the MI5 official confirmed that Masood was given a “holding code” that identified him as a possible threat. “It indicated we believed he posed a threat to national security,” he said.

Asked what they knew of Masood, he said: “Not very much. Simply that there was an individual not fully identified called Khalid Masood based in Saudi Arabia who was thought to be an extremist.”

The official, giving evidence from behind a screen to protect his identity, said agents later decided that Masood was not involved in the plot. “By March 2010, we were satisfied the individual facilitating travel [to the tribal areas] was not Khalid Masood,” he said.

At a meeting in December 2010, Masood was downgraded to “an individual who may be of interest to national security”, but the MI5 official said the change was “information management” and would not have affected any investigation. In a statement to the inquest, lawyers for MI5 said no record was kept of the reason why Masood’s status was downgraded, but that there are “limits to what it is feasible for the security services to record” about decision-making processes.

Masood became a “closed subject of interest” to MI5 in 2012, and stayed that way until he mounted the Westminster terror attack in March last year.

The MI5 official said Masood was among 20,000 other “closed subjects of interest”, at a time that the service was monitoring around 3,000 potentially active suspects while facing an “unprecedented” terror threat.

Masood, who had a history of violence before converting to Islam in prison in 2004, attended the same mosque in Crawley as the fertiliser bomb plotters, and lived among extremists in communities in Luton and Birmingham, the inquest has heard.

On March 22 last year the 52-year-old drove a car at pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing four people, and then stabbed to death Pc Keith Palmer in the grounds of Parliament before being shot dead.

The inquest continues.