Target Britain

IT WAS an unusual time of day for a police raid.

The bizarre timing was a clear indication that the security services and the police had decided to take precipitate action.

By the end of the day 13 men, all of Asian origin, had been seized and transferred to London’s Paddington Green police station for questioning on terrorism charges. Two have already been released and police have been given until today to question the others

The question now is whether the British security services have pulled off a major coup in the war against terrorism. It is alleged that one of the men held is the most important al-Qaeda leader in Britain, a "member of the management cell" in the words of an American counter-terrorism official.

On the other hand, past experience suggests the men could yet be released without charge, further fuelling anger among Britain’s Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted by the police.

So far Scotland Yard has been unusually tight-lipped, saying only that the arrests are part of "continuing and extensive inquiries by police and the Security Service into alleged international terrorism".

But indications from across the Atlantic are that one of four men held in Willesden, London, is Abu Eisa al-Hindi or Abu Musa al-Hindi, who uses the code-name Bilal, and is the senior al-Qaeda representative in Britain. One US official described him as "a major player who moved operational information between key components of al-Qaeda".

The trail that led to last week’s dramatic developments began in mountainous and remote South Waziristan, a part of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, where fiercely independent tribes govern their own affairs, and where al-Qaeda and the Taliban enjoy widespread popular support.

Earlier this year, under unprecedented pressure from the Bush administration, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf sent troops into South Wazistan to attack al-Qaeda bases. The operation achieved considerable success, forcing many al-Qaeda leaders to flee. Flushed out from their mountain lairs they scattered and took refuge in the cities.

They may have felt safe among the teeming masses of Pakistan’s urban areas, but sophisticated CIA software that can track e-mails and pinpoint the geographical positions of laptops

resulted in the arrest last month of at least two senior al-Qaeda operatives,

Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a computer expert, and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an al-Qaeda suspect indicted for his role in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa.

The yield of information on the two men’s computers has been described by one US intelligence official as a "treasure trove" of information, which is "chilling" in its scope and breadth. On Khan’s computer were hundreds of images, including photographs, drawings and layouts of potential US and British targets. Among them were photographs of Heathrow and of underpasses beneath several buildings in London.

Alarm bells rang on both sides of the Atlantic. Indications that Khan had been in computer contact with at least six individuals in the US within the past few months led US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to put key financial centres on high ‘orange alert’,

including the Stock Exchange in New York, and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington.

According to A senior intelligence official, the information from Pakistan showed that al-Qaeda had carried out detailed surveillance to assess security in and around these buildings, the best places for reconnaissance, how to make contact with employees who work in the buildings, traffic patterns and the locations of hospitals and police departments.

The Democrats cried foul, accusing the White House of a plot to distract attention from John Kerry’s big speech at the Democratic Convention in Boston, especially after it was revealed that much of the information was old, even preceding the September 2001 attacks.

British police sources acknowledged that they had been forced to act more hastily than planned when they launched their raids on Tuesday. Bilal was the principal target, and as soon as he was located it was decided to move in, even though not all alleged members of the cell had been pin-pointed. There are unconfirmed reports that five other wanted men managed to escape.

One of those who had received coded messages from Khan was Bilal. Little is known about him apart from the fact that he was born in Pakistan, is in his late 20s and has lived in Britain for several years.

More is known about Khan, who is said to have cooperated with his captors to such an extent that he followed instructions from them to send computer messages to trap other al-Qaeda members. According to one report, Ghailani, who had $25m on his head, was ensnared in this way.

The son of a purser working for Pakistan International Airlines, Khan spent some time at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1998 before coming to Britain. He registered as a student for night classes in resources management studies at City University in London last year, but left after attending a few lectures. He also visited the US and Germany, officially as a student.

Khan is said to have told his captors that while in Britain he visited Finsbury Park mosque, where he met the radical cleric Abu Hamza, who is awaiting extradition proceedings to the US. He is also reported to have said that he met Bilal twice in Britain, and that his role was to provide surveillance details about Heathrow, leaving the method and timing of any terrorist attack to Bilal.

It is believed that most of the other men held in the latest police swoop are under suspicion because they knew Khan.

Details that are emerging shed fresh light on the extent to which the intelligence services of Britain, the US and Pakistan are cooperating in the campaign against al-Qaeda.

Pakistan is in the front line, and Musharraf is under enormous pressure. According to the US journal New Republic, Pakistani security officials claim that the Bush administration is pressing Musharraf to catch Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri or the Taliban leader Mullah Omar before the US elections in November, and even suggested that the best time would be during the Democratic convention. The White House has categorically denied the story.

However, the US has dramatically re-fashioned its relationship with Pakistan since the September 11 attacks. Under procedures agreed between the two governments, US intelligence agents are allowed to eavesdrop and conduct wiretaps on terrorism suspects in Pakistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has set up special units of hundreds of newly-recruited agents to collect counter-terrorism intelligence using state-of-the-art surveillance equipment provided by the United States, according to the Washington Post.

Pakistan is eager to claim credit for the information derived from the latest arrests. Interior minister Faisal Saleh Hayyat said last week that a total of 20 terror suspects had been arrested in recent weeks as part of the sweep against al-Qaeda. "We have received a huge amount of information from the arrested foreign and Pakistani terrorists, and such information is shared with other countries on a reciprocal basis," he said.

In return Pakistan is being handsomely rewarded. Last month the US Congress voted to give Pakistan $3bn in aid and debt relief over five years, including $300m this year for its support of the war on terror.

Pakistan can hardly avoid cooperating with the West. It needs all the intelligence help it can get. Musharraf has survived at least three attempts on his life, and nine days ago finance minister Shaukat Aziz escaped unhurt in a suicide bomb attack that killed seven people and wounded 28.

Back in Britain, the important question is why and how this country has so far avoided such acts of terrorism - especially the kind of huge attacks on civilians suffered in America, Spain and Bali.

Remarkably, despite media attention on terrorism, the number of terrorist attacks and the number of victims of terrorist attacks have actually gone down, according to Justin Lewis, professor of communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.

"The evidence suggests that the attack on 9/11 was not the dawn of a new era of global terrorism, but a devastating one-off," he says. "Indeed, the years since then have seen fewer incidents per year than at any time in the last 20 years."

Experts say that the public is getting a mixed message from the government on terrorism. People are being told, on the one hand, to be on the alert because of possible terrorist activity, but they are also being urged to go to work or shop just as normal.

The more terrorist alerts which go off without incident there are, the greater the risk of public scepticism - and there are indications that "alert fatigue" is setting in.

The difficulty for the counter-terrorism organisations is that since they cannot publicise their successes the public cannot know how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted.

John Pike, defence and security analyst with the Washington-based GlobalSecurity.org says that people are becoming immune to the warnings, but that the latest threat may wake people up because the information is so specific.

"People had stopped paying attention to these colour-coded alerts because they didn’t know what to do about them and nothing ever happened," he said. "This one is different. It is sufficiently specific that, at least in the affected areas, people are going to be very focused on it."

In Britain there could be another price to pay in the antagonism being stirred up within the Muslim community. Since 9/11 609 people have been arrested in Britain for terrorist related offences. Of these, only 99 have been charged with terrorist offences. That leaves 510 who have been freed, granted bail, cautioned or charged with other offences. So far there have been only 15 convictions for terrorism, although a number of trials are awaited.

But Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, told a parliamentary committee that "wastage" between arrests and charging was inevitable, given that the reason for an arrest was simply "reasonable suspicion". The next few days should show whether the suspicions leading to the latest arrests were reasonable or not.

Counting the human cost of three years of al-Qaeda bombings

MAJOR terrorist attacks on civilian targets linked to al-Qaeda since September 11, 2001:

April 2002: Explosion at a synagogue in Tunisia left 21 dead, including 14 German tourists.

May 2002: A car exploded outside the Sheraton Hotel, Karachi, Pakistan, killing 14.

October 2002: 202 people, including 23 Britons, killed and 209 injured by terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia.

November 2002: 16 killed in a suicide bombing at a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and surface-to-air missiles fired at a chartered Israeli airliner.

May 2003: Suicide bombers killed 34 at housing compounds for Westerners in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

May 2003: Four bombs targeting Jewish, Spanish and Belgian sites in Casablanca, Morocco, killed 33.

August 2003: A suicide car bomb killed 12 at Marriott Hotel, Jakarta, Indonesia.

August 2003: A cement truck packed with explosives detonated outside the headquarters of the United Nations in Iraq, killing 20.

November 2003: Explosions rocked a housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing 18 and wounding 122.

November 2003: Suicide car bombers attacked two synagogues in Istanbul, Turkey, killing 25.

November 2003: Two truck bombs exploded outside the British consulate and the Turkish headquarters of the HSBC bank in Istanbul, Turkey, killing 26. Among the dead were British Consul-General Roger Short.

March 2004: Train bombings in Madrid, Spain, killed 190 and injured more than 1,000.