Nine more Held in London
28/07/2005| IslamWeb
Anti-terrorist officers have arrested nine men in dawn raids on Thursday in connection with the botched 21 July attacks on London's transit system.
Scotland Yard police headquarters said the men were arrested under the Terrorism Act at two properties in the neighbourhood of Tooting, south London. They were being held in a central London police station.
The arrests follow a significant breakthrough on Wednesday, when police officers arrested in Birmingham, central England, one of the four men suspected of carrying out the failed attacks - Yasin Hassan Omar, 24. He was being held at a top-security police station in London.
More arrests
The three other bombers suspected of carrying out last week's attacks were not believed to be among the nine men arrested on Thursday, and were still on the run, a police official who declined to be named said.
Residents in Tooting said police had arrested three Turkish men from a fast food take-away.
Raja Kumar, who runs a 24-hour convenience store next to the restaurant, said dozens of officers raided the property at 4.30am.
"Police said to us 'stay inside' and then they took away three people from the shop, a man aged about 45 called Ali who has been living there for two years and two younger men aged about 28 and 26," he said.
Six other men were arrested from a property in nearby Garratt Terrace, a street opposite the Tooting Broadway subway station.
Tight security
Security was tight at many subway stations in central London on Thursday - three weeks after the 7 July attacks on three subway trains and a bus that killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers, and a week on from the failed 21 July attacks.
British transport police said they made their "largest deployment ever" on the London Underground in a bid to reassure the public, a spokesman said.
"This is certainly the largest number of people we've had at stations, at Underground stations," the transport police's media manager Simon Lubin told AFP. "I would say (the largest) ever."
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