UK bomb police search houses in N. England

By Paul Majendie and Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) – British police searched five homes
around the northern city of Leeds on Tuesday in the hunt for
suspected al Qaeda bombers who killed at least 52 people in
London train and bus attacks last week.

It was the first reported swoop since last Thursday’s
explosions and came as frustration mounted at what many
grieving relatives feel is slow progress in formally
identifying the victims.

Detectives called the swoop “significant” but there was no
early word of any arrests.

Leeds has one of the biggest Muslim populations in Britain.

In May 2001, it was one of a series of northern towns which
saw rioting between Asian and white youths blamed on ethnic,
religious and racial divisions.

In Brussels on Tuesday, finance minister Gordon Brown
pressed the European Union to speed up a raft of measures aimed
at cutting off terrorism funding.

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities
and the March, 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 25-nation bloc
agreed to tighten controls on money transfers and seizing the
assets of suspects. Brown wants them to move faster.

But top EU Commission official Fabio Colasanti said a
proposal from Britain, Ireland, France and Sweden to log all
phone and Internet usage for long periods to help combat
terrorism is unrealistic.

ANGRY RELATIVES

British Defense Secretary John Reid appealed to anxious
relatives for more time. “It is better to get this right than
to get it rushed,” he said.

Five days after London’s worst peacetime bomb attack,
Emmanuel Wundowa angrily complained that he first found out on
television that his wife Gladys had been identified as a
victim.

“Nobody is telling me anything,” he said. “If they have got
some information that is of benefit to me, why don’t they pass
it on to me?”

University College London, where she worked as a cleaner,
first identified her as one of the victims and then
apologetically withdrew the statement.

The most public face of grief was offered by Marie
Fatayi-Williams who flew in from Nigeria to find out what had
happened to her son Anthony.

During an emotional speech made just yards from the
wreckage of the bus blown up in Tavistock Square, she held up
photos of her son and pleaded for information.

“This is Anthony, my first son, my only son. He is the love
of my life,” she said. “I need to know what happened.”

USAF LONDON BAN

The United States was lambasted by the UK media on Tuesday
for ordering its 10,000 Air Force personnel stationed in
Britain to stay away from London.

Reid said his office had been in touch with the U.S.
embassy. “I understand this is being urgently reviewed,” he
said.

As police continued checking hundreds of hours of CCTV
footage from the London underground system and elsewhere, a
poll in the London Times newspaper showed an overwhelming
majority of Britons would support tough new measures.

Some 86 percent of those questioned backed giving police
new powers to arrest people they suspect of planning attacks
and 88 percent said they were in favor of tighter controls on
who comes into Britain.

(Additional reporting by Huw Jones and Sumeet Desai in
Brussels)