A massive police hunt for the remaining fugitive London bombers appeared to be paying off on Friday as officers launched a massive raid in the capital, reportedly targeting another of the wanted men.
Residents of White City, a suburb in the west of the city, saw police wearing gas masks and carrying machine guns swiftly seal off streets before a large explosion was heard, followed by a series of smaller blasts.
Residents said police told them that the later explosions were stun grenades, used by officers as a non-lethal way of disarming dangerous suspects.
“We are in the early stages of an armed operation in the W10 area of west London,” a spokesperson for London’s metropolitan police said in a brief statement.
“It’s in connection with the attempted bombings on July 21 and cordons are in place as a precaution.”
Sky News television cited police sources as saying the raid was aimed at capturing “one or more” of four bombers who launched failed suicide attacks on the city on July 21, three of whom remain at large.
A resident in Dalgarno Gardens, an estate of social housing apartments in west London, said he could hear armed police seemingly negotiating with a man in another flat.
“They are saying, ‘You must take off your clothes, put your hands on your head and come out,'” Paul Redfern, a 72-year-old retired man, said.
“I can hear armed police negotiating. They have been saying this for some time now,” he said, adding that he was confined to his home by police.
If officers have tracked down another of the suspected attackers, it will be a major breakthrough in the massive hunt for the men, two days after Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar was detained on Wednesday in the central English city of Birmingham.
Apart from Hassan Omar, police have thus far also named Eritrean-born Muktar Said Ibrahim, also known as Muktar Mohammed Said, as one of the four suspected bombers who fled when their bombs apparently failed to go off fully on July 21.
The attack was a virtual carbon copy of events two weeks earlier, when 56 people, including four British Muslim suicide bombers, died when blasts were set off on three subway trains and a bus.
As part of continuing investigations into the July 7 blasts, British embassy staff in Zambia were trying on Friday to establish whether the mastermind behind the attack has been arrested in the country.
Zambian officials had informed British officials that a British national had been arrested, a British Foreign Office spokesperson in London said, but embassy staff were still seeking consular access.
British police and the Foreign Office have refused to confirm United States reports that Haroon Rashid Aswat, a Briton of Pakistani origin previously named as the suspected planner of the July 7 attacks, is the captured man.
However, a Zambian intelligence official confirmed that someone was being held “in connection with terrorist activities”.
Amid frantic efforts to track down the men responsible for the two sets of attacks, an unseemly spate of bickering has broken out between officials.
In highly unusual public criticism of another force, London police chief Ian Blair condemned the use of a high-voltage stun gun by officers in Birmingham to subdue Hassan Omar.
“I’ll be honest, we don’t understand how they could possibly,” Blair said on BBC television late Thursday when asked why the taser stun gun was used.
“It was an incredible risk to use a taser on a suicide bomber because the taser itself could set it [a bomb] off and that is not the policy,” he said.
And as relatives and friends mourned Jean Charles de Menezes, a young Brazilian man shot by anti-terror police a week ago, the official leading an inquiry into his death condemned the interior ministry for revealing the 27-year-old’s visa had expired.
Officials should “shut up” until the inquiry was over, Nick Hardwick, head of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, said in an unusually blunt rebuff.
Friends and family of De Menezes remembered him Friday, a week after his death.
Allessandro Pereira, a cousin of De Menezes, laid flowers at Stockwell underground station in south London, where the electrician was chased before being shot dead on July 22.
Pereira was too overcome with emotion to speak, and a friend of the dead man paid tribute as mourners held hands in a circle and played music.
“It’s a week since his death, we don’t want to talk about politics, we just want to make sure he’s remembered today,” said Alice Soares.
“No matter what’s said in the press and the future, he was a good and decent person and we need to remember him as a decent man.”
Almost all the 6 000 residents of De Menezes’s home town of Gonzaga turned out to pay their respects as his body arrived home on Thursday. His funeral was scheduled for later Friday. — AFP