January 21, 2003	Tuesday	Ziqa’ad 17, 1423

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LONDON, Jan 20: Police used battering rams and ladders to raid a London mosque on Monday, and arrested seven men as part of a wider probe into the discovery two weeks ago of ricin poison.

But in a sign of the sensitivity of the operation, the officials 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 London mosque was a centre for recruiting 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 officials in body armour 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,” a police official said. “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 counter-terrorism 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 religious figures, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who made headlines after praising the Al Qaeda network. Egyptian-born Masri, who has one eye and wears a hook where a hand was blown off by a landmine, was not arrested.

“DESECRATION”?: He said the raid was a “barbaric desecration of our mosque”, part of an unfair wider “war on Muslims”. It was a knee-jerk reaction to last week’s killing of a policeman in a raid in northern England, said Masri.

Masri, leader of a group called Supporters of Sharia, 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 statement said. No chemicals were found at the mosque.

Britain has arrested more than 200 suspects since the Sept 11 attacks, with most of those detained said to be north African and mainly Algerian.

A spokesman for Prime Minister said the operation had the prime minister’s full support. “The Islamic religion has been hijacked by a small group of fanatics,” he added.—Reuters