LONDON, July 29: British police on Friday arrested two more of the suspected bombers they had been hunting over failed attacks on London’s transport system. In Rome, Italy’s interior minister said another suspect wanted over the July 21 attacks had been detained in the Italian capital. A police source said the arrests in London were ‘potentially very significant’.

Armed police surrounded an apartment in the west of the city and a tense siege unfolded live on television, with one witness relaying via her mobile phone the shouts of police officials urging the suspect to surrender. Police said they had made three arrests at two different locations on Friday.

The BBC and Sky television said men suspected of trying to carry out attacks at the Oval underground railway station in south London and on a Number 26 bus had been detained.

WEST LONDON SIEGE: Police in black flak jackets and gas masks rushed into the housing estate in the Ladbroke Grove area, a few hundred metres from where a fifth bomb was found abandoned in bushes two days after the failed attacks.

Josephine Knight, 55, who watched the siege unfold through binoculars from her apartment directly opposite, said: “They blew the door off with plastic explosives, then threw in canisters of tear gas.

ROME ARREST: Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said the suspect arrested in Rome was a naturalized Briton of Somali origin named Osman Hussain.

A municipal source said Hussain, 27, was arrested at a relative’s home in Rome.