British police interrogated their first captured London bombing suspect and arrested nine more men in pre-dawn raids on Thursday, as chilling details emerged of a large-scale terrorist battle plan. Somali-born Yasin Hassan Omar was zapped with a stun gun as police raided his hideout on Wednesday in the central England city of Birmingham, the first major breakthrough in the massive investigation into the July 21 bomb attacks here. The 24-year-old man is suspected of an attempted suicide attack on a London Underground train near Central London's Warren Street train station, one of four failed bombings on the city's transport system that day. His three alleged accomplices remain at large, police said, as hundreds of officers descended into the Underground in the largest security operation of its kind. Police were hoping that the captured bomb suspect, who was being questioned at London's high-security Paddington Green station, would provide pivotal information about the other three bombers and terror cells possibly dormant in Britain. The July 21 attacks injured no one as the bombs apparently failed to go off properly, frustrating an attempt to repeat the carnage of July 7 when 56 people including the four bombers - three Pakistani-born Britons and a Jamaican Islamic convert - were killed.
An hour before dawn on Thursday police swooped on two properties in South London and arrested nine men in connection with the investigation into the July 21 botched bombings, although none was believed to be an actual bomber. London transport police spokesman Simon Lubin said that officers also had flooded the Underground system. "The state of alert hasn't changed. The operational deployment is to get as many people out there as possible," he said. London's top police officer, Sir Ian Blair, renewed a warning that as long as the other three suspected bombers remained on the loose, their potential to cause death and mayhem was undiminished. "We are in a somber moment and it does remain possible that those at large will strike again," he told a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Attacks could come not just from the three fugitives but also from other terror cells lying in wait and under the radar of the authorities, he said.
Peter Clarke, the London Metropolitan Police's anti-terror chief, was equally blunt. "I must emphasize that until these men are arrested they remain a threat," he said. Only one of the other fugitives has been named: 27-year-old Muktar Said Ibrahim, also known as Muktar Mohammed Said, who migrated to England from Eritrea as a child.
Police released security camera pictures of the other two suspects on Wednesday, including a fresh image of the man accused of trying to detonate a bomb on a train in West London. The man, who had a shaved head and short beard, was pictured traveling on a bus to South London after the bungled attacks.
British newspapers splashed their front pages with pictures of terrorist nail bombs found in a car linked to one of the July 7 suicide bombers. The car abandoned at a railway station in Luton, north of the British capital, was packed with up to 16 homemade bombs, raising fears of a massive terror campaign, according to media reports. Police refused to comment on the X-ray photographs of the bottle-shaped, nail-studded bombs, which greeted the millions of London commuters as they braved the Underground again on Thursday morning. "How big was the terror plot?" asked the left leaning Independent newspaper next to a large picture of the device.
The Times newspaper said that the bombs used by the first suicide squad appeared to have been manufactured by the same person who made those used on July 21. "The nature and number of bombs points to the existence of a large and well-equipped terrorist cell intent on a sustained campaign of attacks," it said. A total of 17 people have been arrested in relation to the July 21 plot, including three women accused of "harboring offenders", police said.