Families honour hero soldiers

Corporal Arjun Purja Pun, Major James Bowman and Lieutenant Neal Turkington, all of 1st Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles, were killed at their base in Helmand Province a week ago by a rogue Afghan soldier, who remains at large.

On the same day, Marine Matthew Harrison, of 40 Commando, was fatally injured, on the eve of his 24th birthday.

Their bodies were brought back to the UK through RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire.

The soldiers' families spent time with the coffins before the funeral cortege made its way through Wootton Bassett on the way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, where post-mortem examinations will take place.

The cortege was met by Cpl Pun's eight-year-old daughter Eva, who had lifted by a relative to place her floral tribute.

Cpl Pun's family had flown to England from his native Nepal on Sunday and were joined by other relatives and friends, many of whom said prayers in front of his hearse.

Private Tirthraj Thapa, who served in the same regiment as Cpl Pun, 33, and lost a leg in an explosion in Afghanistan in May, went to the hearse in his wheelchair to pay his respects.

The 25-year-old said: "He was my section commander in 2007. He was a very good man.

"We all looked up to him. I just hope his family will be okay."

Major Bowman's parents Jonathan and Barbara, both 68, sister Louisa, 32, and half-brothers David Wright, 46, and Brian Wright, 44, each placed a single red rose on his hearse.

Lucy Chittenden, the girlfriend of Maj Bowman, who was known as Josh, was supported by friends before laying a bouquet of roses.

The 34-year-old, of Salisbury, Wiltshire, was the most senior member of the UK forces to die in Afghanistan since Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards, was killed by a roadside bomb last July.

The funeral of another soldier, Corporal Jamie Kirkpatrick, was also held yesterday.

Invasion triggered rise in terror plots

The invasion of Iraq triggered a massive upsurge in terrorist activity against the UK, the former head of MI5 said yesterday.

Baroness Manningham-Buller said the Security Service had been forced to seek a doubling of its budget as it struggled to cope with the volume of plots generated in the aftermath of the invasion in 2003.

Giving evidence to the official inquiry into the conflict, she said ministers were warned the military action against Iraq would lead to a heightened prospect of attack by al-Qaida.

Lady Manningham-Buller – who is the only member of the intelligence agencies, past or present, to give evidence to the inquiry in public – said the evidence of Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been "fragmentary". And she dismissed Tony Blair's argument action had been necessary to prevent them falling into hands of terrorists.

While they had seen a build- up of terrorist activity following the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001, she said the threat had

increased "substantially" in the wake of the military intervention in March 2003.

At times, she said, MI5 had been almost overwhelmed by the number of terror plots.

"We were pretty well swamped – that's possibly an exaggeration – but we were very overburdened with intelligence on a broad scale that was pretty well more than we could cope with," she said.