London, 9 May (AKI) - Anti-terror police on Wednesday arrested four people aged 29-34 in connection with the 7 July 2005 suicide bombings of London's transport system that killed 52 commuters and injured 700. Two men and a woman were arrested in northern England and another man was arrested in central England. Unconfirmed reports said the woman arrested was the widow of the London bombing ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan. Three British Muslim men aged between 23 and 30 were last month charged with conspiracy over the London bombings. They are the first people to be charged in connection with the attacks and Metropolitan police said the inquiry remained a "painstaking investigation."The three men and the woman arrested on Wednesday are being detained at a central London police station on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism and are being questioned by counter-terrorism detectives. The suspects were arrested under Britain's Terrorism Act 2000
Searches were under way Wednesday at two flats in the central English city of Birmingham - where one man was arrested on Wednesday and at five addresses in West Yorkshire — two houses in Dewsbury, two houses in the Beeston neighborhood of Leeds and one house in Batley, police said. Khan was a resident of Dewsbury and had grown up in Beeston.
A key focus of investigations into the London bombings is to trace people who may have provided logistical support to the bombers. "As we have said previously, 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," Metropolitan police said.
A Metropolitan police spokesman reissued an appeal for information about how the London bombers - Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Jermaine Lindsay and Hasib Hussein - were motivated and financed. "We need to know who else, apart from the bombers, knew what they were planning. Did anyone encourage them? Did anyone help them with money or accommodation?" the spokesman said.
There has been severe criticism of both the police and the security services over the handling of the 7 July attacks. Britain's M15 domestic spy service last week issued a rare public defence of its operations after it emerged that British security officials had filmed and recorded conversations of two of the London bombers, Khan and Tanweer, over a year before the attacks. They were also twice filmed in the company of a group of men convicted last week for planning a separate attack.