LONDON - Former MI5 chief Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller has said at the time of the 7/7 terror strike in London, the fear was that the service would not be able to cope with continuing terror attacks.

She said investigators did not immediately know the attack on the capital’s public transport system - which killed 52 people - was carried out by suicide bombers.

Lady Manningham-Buller, director general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency between 2002 and 2007, was speaking ahead of the publication of MI5’s first official history today, The Independent reports.

“My recollection of 7/7 was a feeling of ‘It’s happened’, what we half expected would, what we had prepared for, what we had trained for, so it was a bad day for everybody. But the service started immediately doing all the things that it knew it had to do,” Baroness Manningham-Buller said.

“In the early days we did not know it was a suicide bombing until the forensics began to come through.

So at the beginning we were trying to support the police in possibly finding the team who had done it, who for all we knew, at that stage were still alive and capable of mounting another attack.”

She recalled the failed attacks on July 21: “For me it was worse, although nobody died, although it was an unsuccessful attack, I had that feeling that if this is going to happen every fortnight how are we going to cope with this? (ANI)