London bomber's widow among new arrests over July 7 attacks
LONDON (AFP)Anti-terror police arrested four more suspects Wednesday over the July 2005 suicide attacks in London, including the widow of one of the bombers who killed 52 people.
Police sources said Hasina Patel, 29, the widow of bombers' ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan, was arrested by anti-terror police in an early morning raid at her home in Dewsbury.
Three men were likewise arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000.
Two of the men, aged 30 and 34, were arrested in the Leeds vicinity. Five houses around the city were being searched: two in the Beeston suburb, two in Dewsbury and one in Batley.
The BBC named the 34-year-old as Khalid Khaliq from Tempest Road in Beeston -- the same street as Khan's fellow suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer.
Three of the four attackers had links to Beeston and Dewsbury. A 22-year-old man was arrested at a student residence in Birmingham.
Detectives searched the address while a "full forensic search" was to be conducted at a house in another Birmingham suburb, West Midlands Police said. Armed officers were not used in the arrests.
The investigation into the attacks seems to be gathering pace as three men last month became the first people to appear in court charged over the deadly blasts, which killed 52 innocent people and the bombers.
The suspects arrested Wednesday were taken to a central London police station for interviews in custody by officers from the Metropolitan Police's Counter Terrorism Command. "This was a pre-planned, intelligence-led operation," a Metropolitan Police spokesman said.
Since the attacks "detectives have continued to pursue many lines of inquiry both here in the UK and overseas," he added. "This remains a painstaking investigation with a substantial amount of information being analysed and investigated. "We are determined to follow the evidence wherever it takes us to identify any other person who may have been involved, in any way, in the terrorist attacks."
The police and the security services have faced recent criticism over their handling of the attacks. It emerged last week that links were missed between Khan and Tanweer and those recently convicted for a fertiliser bomb plot.
Security service agents observed Khan and Tanweer meeting the fertiliser plot ringleader Omar Khyam on numerous occasions in 2004. It was also claimed that Khan came to the attention of counter-terrorist police just five months before the London attacks.
The Islamist extremist suicide bombers -- three Britons of Pakistani origin and one naturalised Jamaican -- detonated rucksack devices on three London Underground trains and a double-decker bus.
The attack, at the height of rush hour, was the worst-ever terrorist atrocity on British soil and the first such suicide attack in Europe.
The bombings were followed exactly two weeks later by an alleged copycat attack which failed.
Six men are currently on trial over that incident. The government's official narrative of the attacks released last year identified Beeston, and the social life around its mosques, youth clubs, gyms and Islamic bookshops, as a focal point for the bombers.
Last month Mohammed Shakil, 30, Sadeer Saleem, 26, and Waheed Ali, 23, all from Beeston, appeared at London's Central Criminal Court charged with conspiring with the bombers to cause explosions. They appeared via a video link from prison on April 20 and were remanded in custody until June 8.