14 Suspects Arrested in British Anti-Terror Raids

Anti-terrorist police conducted raids in three British cities Tuesday and arrested 14 suspects, continuing a crackdown on suspected Islamic terrorists in a nation that has gone on high alert for the holiday season.

Police arrested four men in London, five men and a woman in Cambridge, and four men in the Birmingham area. All were held on suspicion of planning or instigating terrorist acts. Few details were disclosed, though the men in London and the Birmingham area were described as Britons of Pakistani descent in their 20s.

The arrests were part of an ongoing operation, said John Stevens, Britain’s top police chief. “We are arresting people continuously. It is part of this massive effort we have been having since 11th September. And it will continue.”

Security forces across Europe are on guard in a climate marked by violence in Iraq, inflamed anti-Western sentiments in the Muslim world, and increased activity by Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and its followers around the globe.

In recent weeks, Stevens and other top officials have warned about the threat of a terrorist attack here. Britain is a prominent target because of its alliance with the U.S. and its military presence in Iraq. The British Foreign Office issued a warning to British nationals in Saudi Arabia last week that expatriate housing complexes in Riyadh, the capital, were under “active surveillance” by terrorists.

The sense of menace escalated last month after twin suicide bombings at the British Consulate and HSBC bank headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey. Those attacks, blamed on bombers affiliated with Al Qaeda, were the first major strike by Islamic terrorists on British targets.

Last week, police made eight arrests around Britain that netted at least one potentially significant suspect: an Islamic studies student in Gloucester whom law enforcement officials have described as a suspected operative of Al Qaeda or one of its allied networks. British and French police are investigating whether Sajad Badat, a 24-year-old Briton of Pakistani origin, planned to attempt a suicide bombing and had contacts with Richard Reid, the British “shoe bomber” convicted in the United States of trying to blow up a Paris-Miami flight two years ago.

Two French anti-terrorist magistrates were in London on the day of Badat’s arrest and are working to determine if he fits into the still-mysterious support network that aided Reid in Belgium, France and Britain. Reid trained in an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, and British investigators want to know if Badat, who spent five years in Pakistan ostensibly to pursue religious studies, may have spent time at a training camp as well. Prosecutors must decide today whether to charge or free Badat.

Authorities did not say whether Tuesday’s raids were related to the Gloucester case. But the arrests reinforced the impression that Britain’s police and intelligence services, known for patient surveillance and infiltration of terror networks, have hit the streets in an effort to round up potentially dangerous extremists.

London Mayor Ken Livingstone told a news conference this weekend that British security forces had “intercepted four attempts that were under plan to actually cause mayhem and take life in this city.” He did not elaborate on the London plots or say when they had been foiled.

Police in Birmingham announced Tuesday that they would deploy armed patrols, still a rare sight in Britain, in the center city during the holidays to safeguard against terrorism.

“During the holidays you have a lot of targets because stores, public places and transport are crowded,” said Claude Moniquet, president of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, a Brussels think tank and consulting agency. “And for Al Qaeda, it would be a great symbolic success to strike in Europe or the United States at Christmas.”

In 2001, Reid came within seconds of igniting his explosives-packed basketball shoes on a Dec. 22 flight. Members of a North African cell in Strasbourg, France, were rounded up in the final days of 2000 as they finished preparations for a Christmas bombing of a cathedral. In 1999, several aborted Al Qaeda attacks were planned to coincide with Millennium festivities -- including a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. The aggressive police activity in Britain may also reflect a shift in strategy as investigators roll up nets cast during long-term surveillance, according to Paul Wilkinson of the anti-terrorism center at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland.

“I think the police have been upgrading their intelligence quite significantly recently and working with international cooperation,” Wilkinson said. “The picture has been greatly improved, and they’re more in a position to identify possible areas of activity and operations.

“I think that the product of that intelligence gathering is that they have been able to tell people that attacks have been thwarted by the police,” he added. “And the police don’t normally say that.”

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Stobart reported from London and Rotella from Paris.