British police arrest 13 suspects in anti-terror operation

LONDON -- Police conducted anti-terrorism raids in London and several towns Tuesday, arresting 13 people believed involved in preparing terrorist acts.\nLondon's Metropolitan Police said the afternoon and evening arrests were "part of a pre-planned, ongoing intelligence-led operation."\nThe men were detained "on suspicion of being concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism," the police statement said, without elaborating.\nThe arrests did not appear to be linked to information Pakistani authorities recently said they had uncovered about threats to Britain and America.\nThe police said the arrests were in northwest London, suburban Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire and in Lancashire, northwestern England. The Lancashire raid was in the town of Blackburn and the Hertfordshire arrests were in Luton, police said.\nDetectives were searching homes in all those places in operations expected to take time to finish, police said.\nThe suspects, who are all in their 20s and 30s, will be brought to a central London police station for questioning by anti-terrorism officers, police said. They declined to specify the men's nationalities, but the British Broadcasting Corp. said they were all of South Asian descent and some were thought to be British citizens.\n"Today's operation is part of continuing and extensive inquiries by police and the security service into alleged international terrorism," the police statement said.\nPolice suggested the raids were not linked to the terror threats disclosed by American authorities Sunday to financial industry buildings in New York, Washington D.C., and Newark, N.J.\nPakistan's information minister said Monday his country found plans for new attacks against the United States and Britain on a computer seized during the arrest last month of a senior al-Qaida suspect wanted for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa.\nAsked whether the Tuesday raids were linked to the recent Pakistani discovery, police declined to answer directly, but noted that the investigation leading to the arrests had been underway for some time.\nWhile British authorities say the threat from terrorism remains high, they have not warned of any specific threat like that announced in the United States. The intelligence behind the latest U.S. terror warnings was as much as four years old, and law enforcement officials are trying to determine whether the plot was current, with terrorists still trying to organize such an attack.\nPolice will have up to two weeks to hold the men before deciding whether to charge them, but courts grant that permission only a few days at a time.\nSuspects arrested in previous anti-terrorism raids have often been released without charge before the two weeks expire.\nCritics say that indicates police have been too quick to make arrests, a charge they deny.\nThe Metropolitan Police said in April that more than half the 572 people who had by then been arrested in anti-terror raids since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had been released without charge.\nFewer than one in five had been charged with terrorism-related offenses; the others were accused of lesser crimes, often immigration violations.\nMassoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, said he was "extremely concerned" that Tuesday's arrests came so soon after the American alert and just before a Parliamentary group is expected to release its report on the Terrorism Act.\n"The timing is very worrying and it is extremely annoying, especially when it actually affects the lives of ordinary people and they are suffering," he said. "It is increasing Islamophobia"