More Terror Arrests In London
Police arrested seven terror suspects early Monday after raiding a north London mosque in an operation linked to the recent discovery of the deadly poison ricin, police said.
The police took no chances, reports CBS News Correspondent Steve Holt, sending over a hundred officers with battering rams, backed up by helicopters, to enter the Finsbury Park mosque.
Some officers were armed. British police officers do not normally carry firearms.
Seven people were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 and taken to a central London police station, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said.
"The operation is part of ongoing and extensive inquiries by the Metropolitan Police's Anti-Terrorist Branch into alleged terrorist activity in London and elsewhere in the U.K.," he said.
The mosque in north London's Finsbury Park area is the base for radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. In a statement, Scotland Yard claims the mosque has recruited suspected terrorists, and supported them both here and abroad.
It was not clear whether al-Masri was among the people detained.
The cleric, who lost both hands and an eye while fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, has become one of the most controversial Muslim figures in Britain.
Police said the operation was linked to a recent series of anti-terrorism raids in Britain but there was no indication that ricin was found at the mosque or in the neighboring houses.
"Evidence gathered during recent counter-terrorist investigations in London and elsewhere has uncovered links between the premises and suspected terrorist activity," the Metropolitan Police spokesman said. "Such evidence has made this operation absolutely necessary at this time."
Four North African men were charged Jan. 13 with chemical weapons and terrorism offenses in relation to the find of the deadly poison ricin in a north London apartment on Jan. 5.
Derived from the castor bean plant, ricin is one of the world's deadliest toxins and has been linked in the past to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network and Iraq.
In 1978, ricin was used by Bulgarian intelligence agents in London to assassinate dissident Georgi Markov, whom they pricked with a poisoned umbrella tip.
In a second raid in the northern England city of Manchester on Jan. 15 that police said was linked to the ricin discovery in London, three North African men were arrested. One of those, Kamel Bourgass, 27, appeared in court on Friday, charged with the murder of a police officer stabbed during the raid.