LONDON: A taxi driver, pizza delivery man, accountant and student. The 23 people in British custody over an alleged aircraft bomb plot are ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives.

Some are family men with young children, others have pregnant wives. To relax they play football or watch cricket, live in unremarkable suburbs or commuter towns and pray at the local mosque, according to reports.

But the apparently unexceptional men are at the centre of an extraordinary alleged plot that has once again focused minds here on the possible existence and extent of Islamic extremism within multi-cultural Britain.

In a headline, Britain’s right-of-centre Daily Mail newspaper called them ‘The middle-class “plotters”’, focusing on Don Stewart-Whyte, the son of an agent for Britain’s main opposition Conservative party and a sports teacher.

Art student Stewart-Whyte, 20, is also the half-brother of former model Heather Stewart-Whyte, who was once married to the French tennis star Yannick Noah, newspapers reported.

The suspect — who is white and from a Christian family in the leafy London commuter belt of High Wycombe — is said to have converted to Islam about six months ago, marrying a Muslim woman and changing his name to Abdul Waheed.

Two of the other men arrested there — Shazad Khuram Ali, 27, and taxi driver Waseem Kayani, 29 — were said to be his friends.

Of the others arrested in High Wycombe, one was British-born West Indian Brian Young, also said to have been born into a devout Christian family and who changed his name to Umar Islam three years ago.

The 28-year-old reportedly became a postman on leaving school and is understood to have a son, the Daily Mail said.

Four of the six arrested in High Wycombe worked in the car export business: the firm was run by Shazad Khuram Ali, who employed his younger brother, and Amjad Sarwar, a 28-year-old who loved cricket. Sarwar’s brother Assad was also detained.

Another Muslim convert, Oliver or Ibrahim Savant, 25, is an accountant. He is being held with his nursery teacher wife Atkia Sidyot after being arrested at their home in Walthamstow, east London.

Savant — whose childhood friends Waheed Zaman, 22, Assan Abdullah Khan, 21, and computer salesman Waheed Arafat Khan, 25, are also under arrest — is reportedly the son of an Iranian-born architect and an English-born bookkeeper.

Zaman is a biomedical science student at London’s Metropolitan University, where he was president of the Islamic Society, who has ambitions to be a doctor or forensic scientist, according to his sister.

Friends and family of the student told The Independent newspaper he was a ‘typical British lad’, who liked nothing better than watching football on television and eating burgers and chips.

Of the others, Asmin Amin Tariq, 23, is a security guard at London’s main Heathrow airport, where the explosives were allegedly to have been carried onto planes bound for the US. He was said to have married recently and had a three-week-old baby.

Muhammed Usman Saddique, 24, worked at a pizza takeaway shop in Walthamstow.

Two of three brothers also arrested in Walthamstow — Umir and Nabeel Hussain, 24 and 21 — were said to be wheeler-dealers, running a cash-and-carry business.

Their father Fazal, a former London bus driver, said the brothers’ only crime had been to go to prayer and be Muslims.

One suspect arrested in Birmingham, west central England — 22-year-old Tayib Rauf — made cakes in the confectionary industry.

Under British anti-terrorism legislation, police have up to 28 days to question the suspects, by which time they have to either release or charge them.

Warrants for further detention of 22 of the 23 suspects were granted on Friday. Police are to apply for a warrant to hold the remaining suspect for longer early next week. —AFP