Lawmaker: UK may have recruited al-Qaida backers

A legislator has called for an investigation into whether British secret services may have mistakenly recruited people sympathetic to al-Qaida, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Patrick Mercer, a Conservative member of Parliament, says six suspect people were recruited in a rush to beef up intelligence following the suicide bomb attacks in 2005, which killed 52 people in London.

The Daily Telegraph quoted Mercer as saying two men recruited by the MI5 intelligence agency had attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan. They were given several weeks of training before being ejected from the service, Mercer said.

Questions were raised about unexplained gaps in the past activities of the other four before they were inducted into the intelligence service, said Mercer, who is chairman of a parliamentary subcommittee on terrorism.

The Home Office declined to comment on his claims.

Mercer said the 9/11 attacks in 2001 should have prompted a major expansion of British intelligence capabilities.

"In fact it took an attack on this country for such measures to be started. But at this point it was an unseemly rush at which our enemies, not unsurprisingly, took advantage," Mercer was quoted as saying.