British minister Kim Howells today said that the London bomb attacks exposed "great problems" in intelligence sharing and called for enhanced coordination between international intelligence agencies.

London was faced with a new threat Thursday when explosives carried by four presumed would-be bombers apparently failed to go off in what would have been a virtual repeat of the July 7 bombings that killed 52 people.

"Certainly I think it exposed very much the great problems that we have with coordination of intelligence," said Howells, the Foreign Office Minister for Counter Terrorism, after giving a lecture in Kuala Lumpur today.

Howells told the audience of government officials and diplomats that there was a growing will among countries to share intelligence, but that there was still some way to go.

Agencies or organisations may obtain information "which is very, very important, very useful, and sometimes we tend to hang onto that because it gives us some kudos, it gives us some power. It gives us some room to negotiate, perhaps with other agencies within our governments," he said.

"That is a critical issue we have to tackle."

Howells said governments needed to work together to decipher the motivations behind terrorist attacks, but that it was still difficult for them to share that information.

"We're not used to doing that very often. We've got our allies who we trust, we have others who we are a litte more suspicious of," he said.

"Somehow I think we have to create the systems and the structures that allow us to do that rather more easily than we have done, rather more willingly than we have done in the past."

New laws necessary

The minister also defended tough new anti-terrorism laws being rushed through Britain's parliament, including a law banning the indirect incitement of terrorism which could be aimed at radical Muslim clerics.

"There is nothing in our laws which is a blatant disregard for human rights," he said when asked if the legislation infringed on personal liberties.

"What about the human rights of the 55 people who died two weeks ago in the London Underground?"

The minister arrived in Kuala Lumpur today after attending an Asian-Europe interfaith conference in Indonesia and is due to leave for Britain on Saturday.

Howells said he had a brief meeting with Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak over security issues and is due to meet Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar later Friday.