Police Begin Crucial Raid With a Bang

It started like an ordinary day. Rachel Cox, a 27-year-old makeup artist, was having lunch with a friend at her apartment overlooking the shabby Peabody Estate in West London when a huge bang reverberated through the red-brick buildings.

“It really did sound like a bomb. We laughed about it being a bomb, but it was quite scary,” recalled Angela Stratford, her guest.

Then, while Cox showered before an afternoon in town, Stratford put her head out the window to smoke a cigarette and look at life passing by on the tree-lined street.

But what the 21-year-old sales manager saw was far from peaceful: ambulances screaming to a halt; police cordoning off the street; officers fanning out along the front of the public housing complex, yelling up to residents in the maze of run-down, four-story apartment blocks to let them in. Other men were putting on white suits and gas masks.

“Angela was screaming, ‘Oh my God, there actually has been a bomb!’ and I came rushing out of the shower to have a look,” said Cox, nervously flicking blond hair behind her ear.

It wasn’t a bomb, but it was no less dramatic.

Police Friday arrested the last three of four men suspected of trying to bomb the city’s transit system on July 21. The explosion, it turned out, was the police blowing off the door of the apartment where two of the men were.

One resident filmed the surrender of the two: Muktar Said Ibrahim, a plump, bearded Eritrean suspected of trying to bomb a bus, and Ramzi Mohammed, whose image was caught by security cameras as he ran from an Underground train station after a bomb failed to go off.

The film of the surrender showed the two men gingerly stepping out to the balcony at the front of the apartment, hands above their heads, apparently naked but visible only from the waist up.

The wobbly footage made it onto TV news, but not until several hours later. British TV channels had heeded a police appeal issued early in the afternoon not to broadcast information that could compromise the operation before it was over.

Residents who emerged from the apartments later in the afternoon, blinking in the sunshine, said they had heard police yell repeatedly: “Mohammed! Come out!”

A voice from inside answered: “How do I know you’re not going to shoot me? I’m scared.”

A policewoman told resident Scott Wilson, 21, to get inside and stay there. The explosion was so powerful, said his mother, Linda, that the young man was knocked off his feet.

Pensioners cut off from their homes by the police tape waited it out at a nearby launderette. Some grumbled that a housing project that had once been home to their families and friends was now packed with transients and fly-by-nights, drug dealers and prostitutes.

But no one grumbled about the police. Skepticism about police efficiency, for years a favorite topic in Britain’s pubs and workplaces, has scarcely been heard here since July 7.

Less than a mile away, in a parallel raid just off the Portobello Road market in fashionable Notting Hill, a man believed to be the brother of Ramzi Mohammed was bundled into an unmarked car by police.

“Blinking madmen,” said an elderly West Indian man who identified himself only by his first name, Andy. “I’d like to put them all in a boat and put them out to sea and pull out the plug. What’s it got to do with politics to blow up a lot of innocent people in a bus?”

One woman, dressed in a long, sand-colored robe and dark head scarf, waited alone at a bus stop. Waris Mohamoud, chairwoman of the North Kensington Somali Women’s Community Group, came to Britain as a refugee in 1990 and is now the mother of seven children and a 5-year-old grandchild.

“Is he Somali, the [man] that they’ve got?” she asked somberly, referring to the East African origin of some of the suspects. “I am sorry about this, because this is the only nation that gives us a safe place to live. We don’t know what they are doing.”

Mohamoud has been trying to organize a meeting to defuse rising hostility against Somalis. “If you are criminal, you are criminal. But most of the Somalis are not -- and now they are scared, some of them so much that they don’t go out,” she said.