LONDON, April 30 — A jury found five British Muslim men guilty on Monday of planning fertilizer-bomb attacks around London, ending a yearlong trial that linked the plotters with two of the four men who blew themselves up on London’s transit system in July 2005.
According to the evidence, revealed during the trial but made public for the first time on Monday, authorities had closely monitored meetings in 2004 between members of the two plots but never fully investigated the men who pulled off the transit attacks, which killed 56 people. To ensure a fair trial, the judge had ordered the news media not to make the information public until after the verdict.
The disclosure turned a victory for British authorities into a day of hand-wringing and recriminations over whether they had missed an opportunity to prevent the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s history.
Within an hour of the verdict, the opposition Conservative Party and survivors and relatives of the victims of the transit attack demanded an investigation into why the authorities did not act on their surveillance.
“Whether deliberately or not, the government have not told the British public the whole truth about the circumstances and mistakes leading up to the July 7 attacks,” said David Davis, the spokesman on counterterrorism for the Conservative Party.
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