British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday that the situation in the Middle East was one of the essential causes of Thursday’s London bombings.

‘The solution cannot only be security measures. You can have all the surveillance in the world and you couldn’t stop that happening. The underlying problems have to be dealt with,’ Blair said in an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4

‘We need to create the circumstances in which some of the critical issues in the Middle East are dealt with and sorted out, and where people can see out there in the Middle East that there is a perfectly good path to democracy if people want to take it,’ he added.