London’s metropolitan police said on Friday they have arrested three men during two raids in the west of the capital, while refusing to confirm that among them were suspected bombers who targeted the city last week.
“Police have arrested two men at one address and a third man has been arrested at the second address. They are being taken to a central London police station for further questioning,” a police statement said.
The arrests mark a potentially crucial breakthrough in London’s massive terror investigation.
One fugitive, Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar, had already been detained in connection with last week’s failed bombings on Wednesday in Birmingham, central England.
The suspected would-be suicide bombers fled when their devices seemingly failed to detonate properly, frustrating an attempt to blow up three London underground trains and a double-decker bus and sparking one of Britain’s biggest-ever manhunts.
In a flurry of activity on Friday, armed police launched raids on two separate parts of west London and shut down one of the city’s main stations.
The most dramatic scenes were played out in Dalgarno Gardens, a run-down estate of public housing apartments in the White City area, where locals reported seeing police laying siege to a man in a 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 added.
Another woman, who did not want to be named, said she heard police shouting the name “Mohammed” at the man before firing tear-gas canisters at the apartment.
Besides Hassan Omar, the only other July 21 suspect named thus far by police is an Eritrean-born man known both as Muktar Mohammed Said and Muktar Said Ibrahim.
Other locals said they heard a loud explosion on the estate before the siege began, followed by a series of smaller blasts, believed to be police stun grenades.
Later, a reporter for news agency AFP at the estate saw three unmarked police cars leaving at high speed. Officers refused to say whether the suspect was inside one of the vehicles.
In a separate operation, streets around Notting Hill, another part of west London nearby, were sealed off for another raid, residents there said.
Meanwhile, Liverpool Street station, just on the eastern edge of the city centre, was evacuated on Friday as armed police made arrests, a spokesperson for the British transport police said.
Two women were arrested and a suspicious package had also been found, he added.
The metropolitan police have been leading the hunt for the July 21 attackers and the masterminds who planned a deadly attack two weeks earlier in which 56 people died, among them four suicide bombers.
As part of the investigations into the July 7 blasts, British embassy staff in Zambia are trying on Friday to establish whether the mastermind behind the attack has been arrested in the country.
Zambian officials have informed British officials that a British national has been arrested, a Foreign Office spokesperson in London said, but embassy staff are 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.
Amid frantic efforts to track down the men responsible for the two sets of attacks, there has also been an unseemly spate of bickering 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 on 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 is over, Nick Hardwick, head of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, said in an unusually blunt rebuff.
Friends and family of De Menezes remembered him on Friday, a week after his death, laying flowers at Stockwell underground station in south London, where the electrician was chased before being shot dead on July 22.
“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,” said Alice Soares, a friend. — AFP