LONDON, 21 January 2003 — British Police used battering rams and ladders to raid a London mosque yesterday in Britain’s biggest anti-terror operation since Sept. 11, arresting seven men as part of a wider probe into the discovery of ricin poison. But in a sign of the sensitivity of the operation, the officers wore special covers on their shoes and avoided prayer areas “to show our respect for the Muslim faith”, according to a police statement.
Security services believe the north London mosque was a center for recruiting violent Islamic extremists and supporting their operations in Britain and abroad. As two helicopters circled over Finsbury Park before dawn — illuminating the mosque with spotlights — about 150 officers in body armor swarmed out of dozens of police vehicles. They climbed up to windows with ladders and used hand-held rams to get through doors, witnesses said.
Seven men were arrested — six North Africans and one East European — from inside the mosque and two adjacent homes. “These are people involved in terrorist activities, we believe,” Assistant Police Commissioner Andy Trotter told reporters. “The intelligence has been justified by what we have found ... a number of very interesting documents.”
It was the most dramatic in a series of counterterrorism swoops in recent months, with the pace quickening after the discovery earlier this month of a small amount of the deadly poison ricin in a flat in the nearby Wood Green district.
The mosque is the base of one of Britain’s most outspoken Muslim leaders, Abu Hamza Al-Masri, who won notoriety for praising Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, which Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks. Egyptian-born Masri, who has one eye and wears a hook where a hand was blown off by a land mine, was not arrested.
He told reporters the raid was a “barbaric desecration of our mosque”, part of an unfair wider “war on Muslims”. It was a knee-jerk reaction to week’s killing of a policeman in an anti-terror raid in northern England, said Masri.
Masri, leader of a group called Supporters of Shariah (Islamic law), said two of the seven men held were security staff and five volunteers who did tasks like cleaning. “Police believe these premises have played a role in the recruitment of suspected terrorists and in supporting their activity both here and abroad,” the police statement said.
No chemicals were found at the mosque. Britain has arrested more than 200 terror suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks, with most of those detained said to be north African and mainly Algerian.
A spokesman from the Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office said the operation had the prime minister’s full support. “The Islamic religion has been hijacked by a small group of fanatics,” he added. Moderate Muslim groups were uncomfortable with the raid on a place of sanctity but eager to distance themselves from Masri.
After the raid, police distributed leaflets around the neighborhood advising residents of what they had done and advising them of alternate places of worship. “Law-abiding worshipers at the mosque want us to deal with people causing a threat to the country and I think they will support us in what we have done today,” Trotter said. (R)
