January 20, 2003	Monday	Ziqa'ad 16, 1423

LONDON: Three networks of suspected Muslim terrorists were being hunted by police and intelligence services on Saturday last night amid fears that they are planning a strike on Britain with biological weapons.

Convinced that an attack in Britain is inevitable, senior security sources revealed that the groups are being sought following raids in London and Manchester by officers searching for the poison ricin.

The sources admitted that tracing the terrorist groups was extremely difficult given the rise of a new generation of “clean skin”extremists - young, radicalised Muslim militants with no previous links to terrorism.

The disclosures came as police announced they had detained three men at one of Britain’s busiest airports and arrested them under anti-terrorism legislation. Immigration officials at Gatwick held the men, aged 28, 29 and 30, on Thursday while they were “in transit”.

They are being held under the Terrorism Act 2000 at an unnamed police station in central London. Police refused to disclose any further details, including the men’s ethnic origin and whether they were leaving or arriving in Britain when they were stopped.

The three groups known by intelligence services to be active are believed to be operating independently of on another. There are fears that one or more of the networks possess ricin, traces of which were allegedly found in a police raid on a London flat two weeks ago.

Last week a 27-year-old Algerian appeared in court charged with the murder of a police Special Branch officer in Manchester last week. Detective Constable Stephen Oake, 40, was stabbed during a raid on a flat in the Crumpsall area of the city last Tuesday. Four men have been arrested in Manchester in connection with the incident.

The Manchester operation was part of the nationwide search for ricin, one of the most poisonous substances known. Four people have already appeared in court following the London raid charged with attempting to produce ricin to develop a chemical weapon. There are fears that a small quantity has been secreted somewhere in the United Kingdom.

Whitehall officials indicated that there were “real threats out there”. One official said: “The balance is difficult to strike. We must not sound complacent. But you can’t tell people to go around wearing gas masks.”

However, senior Scotland Yard sources say that the primary threat is likely to come from suicide bombers.

“The search is being intensified all the time,”one said. “With the IRA we could relax when we had found the bomb. We can’t do that now. The threat of ricin has meant everyone going flat out to find anything else.”

Sources close to Muslim activists in the UK say militants are making themselves ready to strike if Britain goes to war with Iraq. The new generation of militants see their struggle in international terms. Britain, with its close ties to the US, is thus a key target. Such groups act alone, without reference to any leadership. Most are formed on an ad hoc basis in the UK and are not sent from overseas.

“We are looking at loose networks,”said one security source. “The threat and the problems we are facing with Algerian networks is not group-related. These people don’t consider themselves part of any group. There is not a command structure.” One Algerian radical who was once a close associate of Abu Hamza, the extremist London-based preacher, said that the pressure on the Algerian community from the police and security services risked a backlash.

“We were persecuted in Algeria, now we are being persecuted here. There it exploded. The same will happen here,”he told The Observer. In the past ten years, 120,000 people have died in a brutal civil war between Muslim radicals and Algerian security forces. Many Algerian militants arrived in the UK in the early 1990s. Several have been given leave to remain in the UK despite their terrorist past. Two Algerian men involved in murders in their home country are living in London, one working at a mosque, another working as a security guard. Last year The Observer was shown a list of more than 20 radicals living in the UK who were wanted by the Algerian security services.

However, security officials in the UK say the issue of asylum is a “red herring”.

“Some terrorists come through as asylum seekers, some are immigrants or travelling on tourist visas,” one said. “If you stopped asylum, you would not stop terrorism.”

The focus on the radicals who have been in the UK for some time is also misleading. Security sources say many of the men they are now looking for are very young. Security services are concerned that detailed reporting of terrorist arrests risks prejudicing trials.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.