Police question two men in London bomb dragnet

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) – Police were questioning two men arrested
in south London as they combed the city in one of the biggest
manhunts in British history on Saturday for four men wanted for
failed bomb attacks on London’s transport system.

The apparently copy-cat attacks that caused traffic chaos
but killed no one on Thursday came two weeks after suicide
bombers killed 52 commuters in the British capital.

The two men were held after raids late on Friday in the
Stockwell area of south London close to the site of one of
Thursday’s failed bombs on three underground trains and a bus
– the same targets as the July 7 bombs.

The arrests took place hours after police chased and shot
dead another man in front of shocked passengers in the packed
Stockwell Underground train station.

Police released closed circuit television pictures of the
four suspects and appealed for the public to help find them,
but warned that they were dangerous and not to be approached.

Less than 24-hours after the pictures were released police
said they had received more than 400 calls from the public.

The killing of a suspect — shot five times at close range
in the train — took Britain’s fight against terrorism to a new
level of force in a country where only specialist officers
carry weapons and killings by police are very rare.

It sparked a fierce debate over whether police were right
to adopt an apparent shoot-to-kill policy.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) and anti-war
campaigners condemned the shooting as the start of a dangerous
new chapter, but police and London’s mayor defended it.

“IHRC fears that innocent people may lose their lives due
to the new ‘shoot to kill’ policy of the Metropolitan Police,”
chairman Massoud Shadjareh said in a statement.

DEFEND THE PUBLIC

Mayor Ken Livingstone said the duty of the police was to
protect the public against people considered to be terrorist
suspects, and police said they had followed the man they shot
from a house under surveillance and who had run when
challenged.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said it was
investigating the killing, as it did all fatal police
shootings.

Media said police were operating under secret new
guidelines, codenamed Operation Kratos, allowing them to aim
for the head if they believe there was a threat to the public.

Police were sent to a series of security alerts.

Police briefly closed Mile End underground station in east
London on Saturday in a security alert, but declined to comment
on speculation it was over the mistaken sighting of one of the
suspect bombers. They said no one had been arrested.

The July 7 attacks killed 52 people and injured 700 in the
worst peacetime attacks in the city’s history. But on Thursday
the devices failed to go off properly and no one was killed.

Because of that, police have more clues, including the
unexploded bombs, eye witness reports and CCTV footage.

But security experts and the former head of London’s police
warned that the attacks could continue.

“If you look at any normal terrorist campaign through
history it usually does last a fair period of time,” former
Metropolitan Police Commissioner John Stevens told BBC World.

CALL FOR CALM

Details of the manhunt dominated British TV bulletins,
while newspapers splashed the suspects’ pictures beneath the
words “The Four Most Wanted,” “The Fugitives” and “Human
Bombs.”

Witnesses told of plain-clothes police pursuing a suspect
on to a subway train carriage. He slipped as he ran and then
was repeatedly shot at point-blank range as he lay on the
floor.

London’s police chief Ian Blair said on Friday his force
faced “the greatest operational challenge” in its history.

Police refused to say if the men in custody or the man shot
dead were among the four suspects pictured in the photographs.

But the best-selling Sun tabloid said the first man
arrested on Friday was suspected of trying to blow up the bus
in Thursday’s attempted bombings. Police declined to comment.

The Abu Hafs al Masri Brigade, an al Qaeda-linked group,
has claimed responsibility for Thursday’s bombings and those of
July 7 and has threatened to target Italy, Denmark and the
Netherlands, which also have troops in Iraq.

However, the group’s claims of responsibility for previous
attacks in Europe have been discredited by security experts.

Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed for calm but rejected
suggestions that Britain’s invasion of Iraq alongside U.S.
troops in 2003 was in any way linked to the attacks.

(additional reporting by Gideon Long, Peter Griffiths,
Matthew Jones and Quentin Webb)