Police bugged Muslim MP's prison meeting twice

By Peter Apps

LONDON (Reuters) - Police twice bugged private prison conversations between a Muslim MP and a terrorism suspect who was his constituent, an official report said on Thursday.

Ministers ordered an enquiry earlier in the month after media reports said police had bugged Labour MP Sadiq Khan when he met Babar Ahmad who was awaiting extradition to the United States.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the surveillance was targeted at Ahmad not Khan and was authorised by senior police officers not ministers.

"It is absolutely clear from ... the report that my honourable friend was not the target of surveillance," she told parliament. "The procedures for surveillance operations of this kind were properly and lawfully applied."

But she said a review had been ordered and that in future MPs' conversations should be treated in the same way as legally privileged meetings with lawyers.

The bugging report outraged Muslim groups who said it would damage already sometimes strained relations with the police since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and July 2005 suicide blasts in London.

It also angered MPs, who had believed they could not be bugged under the "Wilson doctrine" going back to the 1960s. But Chief Surveillance Commissioner Sir Christopher Rose said this only applied to intercepting their phone calls, not, as in this case, putting microphones in a room.

Rose said in his report Khan had three times visited Ahmad, accused of running Web sites supporting terrorism and raising funds for militants in Chechnya and Afghanistan.