/ 28 July 2005

Suspect questioned as terror fears mount

British police interrogated their first captured London bombing suspect, arrested nine more men and poured officers into London underground stations on Thursday as chilling details emerged of a large-scale terrorist battle plan.

Police zapped Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar with an electrical charge from a taser stun gun to overpower him in a raid on Wednesday in the central English city of Birmingham.

Suspected of an attempted suicide bombing on a London underground train near central Warren Street station on July 21, his interrogation at London’s high-security Paddington Green station may be pivotal to unmasking the scale of the terror plot.

Three other suspected bombers are still on the run after the botched attempt on July 21 to blow up three London underground trains and a double-decker bus, a mirror of the July 7 blasts that slaughtered 52 people including the four suicide attackers.

As the terror hunt gained ground on Thursday, London police arrested nine men at two properties in south London over the July 21 attacks. Police sources said none was believed to be an actual bomber.

Police flooded the underground system.

”This is certainly the largest number of people we have had at stations, at underground stations,” London transport police spokesperson Simon Lubin said. ”I would say [the largest] ever.”

Exactly one week after the attempted July 21 blasts, Lubin said the aim was both to reassure the public and deter the on-the-run bombers.

”The state of alert hasn’t changed. The operational deployment is to get as many people out there as possible,” he said.

Lubin said leave had been cancelled for some officers since the first attack, and reinforcements drafted in from around Britain.

Many police, some armed, could be seen at London underground stations — six alone outside the central Gloucester Road station.

Even with Hassan Omar in captivity, police are racing to capture the rest of the gang to prevent a new attack.

”I must emphasise that until these men are arrested they remain a threat,” said Peter Clarke, the metropolitan police’s anti-terror chief.

Only one of the other fugitives has been named — 27-year-old Muktar Said Ibrahim, also known as Muktar Mohammed Said, who migrated to England from Eritrea as a child.

Police released pictures caught on closed-circuit television of the other two suspects, including a fresh image revealed on Wednesday of the man accused of trying to detonate a bomb on a train in west London on July 21.

The suspect, who had a shaved head and short beard, was pictured on board a bus travelling to south London after the bungled attacks. He was wearing dark trousers, a white vest and a wristwatch on his left arm.

Fears of terror campaign

Adding to the sense of urgency, British newspapers widely picked up on a report by the United States television station ABC that the July 7 suicide bombers left a car packed with up to 16 bombs, raising fears of a massive terror campaign.

Police at Scotland Yard refused to comment on the X-ray photographs of a bottle-shaped, nail-studded bomb that were plastered across the front pages of most dailies after being leaked to the ABC.

”How big was the terror plot?” asked the left-leaning Independent newspaper next to a large picture of the device.

”The terrorist cell … may have been planning to throw nail bombs into a nightclub or a football crowd,” it said in a page-one news story.

The 16 bombs were found in a rental car abandoned at a railway station in Luton, north of the British capital, by the four suicide bombers, who boarded trains to King’s Cross exactly three weeks ago, newspapers reported.

Some of the home-made explosives, thought to be a mix of acetone-based chemicals, were in bottle-shaped containers with dozens of nails packed around them and held in place by cling film.

The nails are designed to act as shrapnel. Others were flat, pancake-shaped bombs, The Guardian said.

The Times newspaper said the bombs used by the first suicide squad and the four would-be bombers two weeks later appeared to have been manufactured by the same person.

”The nature and number of bombs points to the existence of a large and well-equipped terrorist cell intent on a sustained campaign of attacks,” it said. Police have yet to directly link the July 21 and July 7 attacks.

In a complex web of investigation, police arrested three more men in a raid at a second home in east Birmingham on Wednesday, while three women were also detained in London on suspicion of ”harbouring offenders”, police said.

Seventeen people remain in custody in relation to the July 21 plot.

A police spokesperson at Scotland Yard on Thursday morning said she had no reports of any further developments in the probe overnight.

Police chiefs have urged Prime Minister Tony Blair to extend the allowable detention time to up to three months, but the Independent newspaper said the prime minister favours allowing rolling two-week periods, although no decision has been made. — Sapa-AFP