UK cops change bomb tactics

2005-08-01 10:54

London - British police on Monday shifted the focus of their manhunt to the bombmakers, financiers and others they suspect are behind last month's terrorist attacks, now that it seems the four surviving assailants are in custody.

Anxious to thwart any other plots, police are investigating whether there is a network or networks behind the July 21 failed bombings and the deadly July 7 attacks, both of them on London underground trains and buses.

The Times reported that another team of suicide bombers, linked to the four suspected July 7 suicide bombers, was plotting a third attack on the capital.

However, the Guardian newspaper said there was no specific intelligence of a third cell or plans for a fresh attack, though police were acutely aware that another could be in the works.

British police carrying out searches in southern England meanwhile arrested seven more people on Sunday over the botched July 21 terrorist attacks, a spokesperson said.

Unarmed

The Guardian added that the suspects did not appear to be dangerous because the raid was carried out by unarmed officers.

Police investigating the July 21 bid to bomb three Underground trains and a bus now hold 18 people in custody in Britain, including three of the alleged assailants. The fourth, Hamdi Issac, is in Italy facing extradition.

Issac's escape from Britain, despite a massive police manhunt and the wide distribution of his photograph, has prompted the British authorities into mulling how to tighten border controls.

Issac, also known as Osman Hussain, was arrested in Rome on Friday after fleeing London aboard a Eurostar train to Paris on July 26.

Police have warned that despite the arrest of all four suspected July 21 bombers, the threat of further attacks remained "very real".

With the alleged bombers behind bars, police have turned their sights on the ringleaders: the chemists who made the explosive mixture used in the bombs, the technicians who put them together and the ideologues who inspired them.

Involved

"There were quite a few other people involved in the incidents of the 7th and the 21st. It's extremely likely there will be other people involved in harbouring, financing and making the devices," the police spokesperson said.

In central London's high-security Paddington Green police station, police were continuing to interrogate three of the alleged July 21 bombers - Eritrean-born Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, Somali-born Yassin Hassan Omar, 24, and Ramzi Mohammed, whose age and ethnic background have not been released.

Ibrahim and Mohammed were arrested in a west London flat during a raid by heavily armed elite police on Friday. Hassan Omar was arrested last Wednesday in a pre-dawn raid on a house in Birmingham.

- AFP