British police arrest 5th suspect

LONDON — British police arrested a fifth person Sunday and raided homes in three cities in connection with attempted car bombings.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who took over from Tony Blair on Wednesday, said in a nationally televised interview that "we are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with al-Qaida."

On Friday, police in London found two Mercedes sedans packed with propane gas, gasoline and nails and said the drivers intended to detonate them and kill as many people as possible.

On Saturday in Glasgow, Scotland, two men crashed a jeep containing propane gas into the main terminal of the Glasgow Airport, setting it on fire. Those two men are in custody.

The driver, who witnesses said tried to immolate himself, suffered severe burns and is in critical condition in a Scottish hospital. Outside that hospital Sunday, police carried out a "controlled explosion" on a suspicious car but did not find explosives.

Security officers also temporarily shut down a portion of London's Heathrow Airport on Sunday to investigate reports of a suspicious package.

In addition to the two men involved in the Glasgow attack, a 26-year-old man and a 27-year-old woman were arrested in central England. A 26-year-old man also was arrested in Liverpool.

Though police have not released details about those in custody, several witnesses at the airport said the men appeared to be of South Asian descent. CNN and Sky News reported late Sunday night that two of the five people in custody were medical doctors. The BBC reported that none were British but came from "various Middle Eastern countries" and that one prime suspect was still at large.

Scotland's justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, said the two men involved in the airport attack were not "born and bred here; any suggestion to be made that they are homegrown terrorists is not true."

John Neilson, a senior police official, told a group of Muslims at the Central Mosque in Glasgow: "The people we have in custody came to Scotland a short while ago to seek work. ... These are not your young people."

Bashir Maan, president of Islamic Center in Glasgow, who was at the mosque meeting, said in a telephone interview that "the Muslim community was very despondent" over the attacks but relieved that those arrested are not from Scotland. Maan said there are about 50,000 Muslims in Scotland.

Terrorism analysts said it seemed that the timing and location of the planned attacks were intended to coincide with Brown's first days of office. They also noted that Brown is Scottish.

"That was probably a major factor in this," said M.J. Gohel, chief executive of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank that specializes in security issues.

Gohel said the perpetrators might have been trying to fuel public pressure for a rapid withdrawal of British troops from Iraq. "This was a signal to the new government, a statement of intent and intimidation," he said.

Peter Clarke, Scotland Yard's chief of anti-terrorism operations, said the investigation was "fast moving. It is no exaggeration at all to say that new information is coming to light hour by hour." Police were searching homes and buildings near Glasgow and in Staffordshire and Liverpool.

Clarke said "extremely valuable" forensic information was found in the two Mercedes sedans. He said the links between the Glasgow and London attempted bombings were becoming "ever clearer."

"I'm confident — absolutely confident — that in the coming days and weeks we will be able to gain a thorough understanding of the methods used by the terrorists, of the way in which they planned their attacks, and of the network to which they belong." He said thousands of hours of closed-circuit television footage were being analyzed.

Scottish police, who encouraged the many witnesses at Glasgow Airport to hand over any cellphone and camera images of the incident, said they were receiving about 100 calls an hour from the public.

"We will not yield, we will not be intimidated, and we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life," Brown said. The country can expect "a long-term and sustained attack on values we represent" by extremists using different weapons, "whether planes or cars," he said.

The attempted strikes in both London and Glasgow had amateurish aspects, according to anti-terror officials and experts.

"It seems what we saw here are low-scale attacks that are easier to orchestrate than something such as an aviation attack," said Gohel. "The London plot was amateurish; they seem to have done little reconnaissance. The device may have not been rigged up properly."

Nonetheless, the plots had deadly potential and may well have had links to serious networks, he said.

In a quarterly intelligence report leaked to the Sunday Times of London and published April 22, Britain's Joint Terrorism Analysis Center revealed that a senior al-Qaida commander had advocated carrying out an attack in Britain before Blair left office.

According to the report, intelligence officials had recovered a letter written by Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a top al-Qaida operative, who was later captured by the CIA, detailing al-Qaida's desire to attack Britain during "a change in the head of the company," namely the handover of power from Blair to Brown.

British intelligence officials have described al-Iraqi as the brains behind a separate, failed plot in 2004 to bomb a London nightclub, power plants and a shopping mall. Five men were sentenced to life in prison in April for their role in that case, which was dubbed "Operation Crevice" by British police.

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.