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A police officer entered one of the two houses raided by police in Stoke-on-Trent on Monday.
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Darren Staples/Reuters
Officers waited in an alleyway between two houses being searched in Stoke-on-Trent on Monday.
The action, designed “to ensure public safety,” as the police put it, took place as European concerns over terrorism have spiked after a suicide bombing in Sweden carried out by a British resident, a number of terrorism arrests in Spain and France, and alarms in Germany over reported threats of a terror attack modeled on the onslaught by gunmen in Mumbai. Three ago, the State Department cautioned American citizens in Europe about reports of a planned attack on a European city.
The BBC said the 12 suspects were involved in a plot to bomb unspecified targets in Britain and were inspired by Al Qaeda. Some were said to have Bangladeshi origins. John Yates, Britain’s ranking counterterrorism police officer, said the detained men were from London, the Welsh city of Cardiff and Stoke-on-Trent in the English Midlands.
“The operation is in its early stages so we are unable to go into detail at this time about the suspected offenses,” Mr. Yates said in a statement. “However, I believe it was necessary at this time to take action in order to ensure public safety.”
He described the raids as a “large scale, pre-planned and intelligence-led operation” involving several police forces. The officers who made the arrests — apparently after weeks of surveillance — were not armed, the police said, suggesting that they had not moved to thwart an imminent terror attack.
European officials have insisted that there are no specific threats of attacks timed to coincide with the holiday season, despite some reports that the Dec. 11 bombing in Stockholm was part of an Al Qaeda conspiracy to strike at that period.
The investigation into that case is still unfolding in Luton, just north of London. That is believed to be the home of Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, the 28-year-old Swedish-Iraqi man who killed himself and wounded two others when he detonated two bombs near one of Stockholm’s busiest shopping districts. But a spokesman for Scotland Yard, speaking in return for anonymity under police rules, said that Monday’s arrests were not connected to that case.
A police statement said that 11 of the suspects, aged between 17 and 28, were arrested “at or near their home addresses” but that one of the four from Stoke-on Trent, was seized to the south, “at a domestic property in Birmingham.”
“Searches are now being conducted at the home addresses, plus the address in Birmingham and another residence in London,” the statement said. Five of the suspects lived in Cardiff and three in London.
The police said the suspects would be questioned “on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism” in Britain.
A British intelligence operative, who spoke in return for anonymity under departmental rules, said that the investigation had drawn on cooperation between several intelligence agencies and electronic monitoring in several European countries and that Internet communications had been intercepted.
Britain has been a focus of terrorism since four suicide bombers killed 52 people in attacks on the London rapid transit system on July 7, 2005. In the last major series of arrests here, in April 2009, the police apprehended 12 suspects across northern England but released them without charge, saying a Qaeda bomb attack had been averted in the northwestern city of Manchester.
A British former counterterrorism official, who did not want to be identified by name while discussing current operations, said in an interview last month that Scotland Yard was working on almost a hundred terror cases. Thirty of those, he said, are pressing, with around 10 classified as urgent or imminent.
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