British Police Search Homes; 5 Held in Hunt for Bombers

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, July 1 — With Britain’s terrorism threat alert at its highest level, the British police raided homes in three cities today and arrested a fifth person following attempted car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow that the authorities said were linked.

The investigation into the bombings seemed to unfold at a rapid pace today, security experts and officials said, because unlike most other terror attacks in which evidence was destroyed by explosions, the police have retrieved a trove of forensic evidence from the three vehicles involved and closed-circuit television footage. Moreover, the police were able to detain several suspects within hours of the bombings.

The police said officers were searching homes in Houston, near Glasgow; in southern Liverpool and in the Midlands location of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. The fifth person arrested, a 26-year-old man, was seized in Liverpool, the police said.

Two other people — a 27-year-old woman, and another 26-year-old man — were arrested Saturday night when the police, some in unmarked cars, closed in on a car traveling on the M6 highway in northwest England.

Britain remained on edge today after British officials raised the terrorism threat alert on Saturday from “severe” to “critical,” meaning a further attack appeared to be imminent.

In an episode that was only partly explained, the Scottish police carried out a controlled explosion today on a car in the parking lot outside a hospital near Glasgow Airport where one of the two men first arrested for trying to attack the airport with a blazing sport utility vehicle on Saturday was being treated for severe burns.

The police said the car was “linked” to the two suspects but had not, in the end, posed a danger. The police also discounted earlier suspicions that one of the men had been wearing a suicide belt.

Tonight, part of Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport near London was temporarily closed after a suspicious package was found, news agencies reported.

The British authorities did not identify any of the five people arrested in connection with the attempted car bombings, but witnesses to the Glasgow Airport attack described the two men in the S.U.V. as being of South Asian descent.

“The people we have in custody came to Scotland a short while ago to seek work,” a senior police officer, John Neilson, told a meeting of Scottish Muslims at the Central Mosque in Glasgow. “These are not your young people.”

Scotland’s justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill said the two men who slammed a Jeep Cherokee into the check-in area entrance of Glasgow Airport on Saturday were not “born and bred here; any suggestion to be made that they are home grown terrorists is not true.”

Senior counterterrorism officers said that although the investigation was unfolding rapidly, it could take weeks more to sift through a mass of evidence from closed-circuit television cameras.

“We are learning a great deal about the people who were involved in the attacks,” said Peter Clarke, Britain’s highest-ranking counterterrorism police officer, at a news conference in Glasgow. But he declined to give details about the five people who were arrested. He said that the link between failed car bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport on Saturday “are becoming ever clearer,” and that the investigation is “extremely fast-moving.

The attack in Glasgow followed the discovery in London on Friday of two cars filled with gasoline, gas canisters and nails. The S.U.V. used in Glasgow was also carrying propane gas containers, but they did not explode when the vehicle, and its driver, burst into flames. The similarities between the styles of the attack have convinced British investigators that they are linked, security officials in several countries said.

The series of attacks and alarms appeared to be the third onslaught of summer terrorism since the London bombings in July 2005, and they unnerved many Britons. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in office for just days and facing what newspapers called a baptism of fire, called for heightened vigilance and warned of dangers to come.

“We will not yield, we will not be intimidated and we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life,” Mr. Brown in his first broadcast interview since taking over as prime minister from Tony Blair on Wednesday.

Mr. Brown said Britain was dealing with a “long-term threat; it is not going to go away in the next few weeks or months.” He said Britain was “dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with Al Qaeda.”

In the past, some Muslim leaders have said Britain’s military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it vulnerable to attack from disaffected members of the Muslim British minority of around 1.6 million people.

Mr. Brown, in a way of response, said, “Irrespective of Afghanistan, irrespective of what is happening in different parts of the world, we have an international organization trying to inflict the maximum damage on civilian life in pursuit of a terrorist cause that is totally unacceptable to most people.”

At the same time, Mr. Brown’s newly appointed counterterrorism advisor, John Stevens, a former Scotland Yard police chief, said the attempted car bomb attacks signaled “a major escalation in the war being waged on us by Islamic terrorists.”

“It is not simply the horror of yet more attempts at mass murder that is so chilling — but the change in the psychotic thought processes behind it,” Sir John said in a column in the British Sunday tabloid The News of the World. He added, “Now it is clear a loose but deadly network of interlinked operational cells has developed.”

“Al Qaeda has imported the tactics of Baghdad and Bali onto the streets of the U.K,” he said.

In Liverpool, witnesses said the police moved in with dogs while a helicopter hovered overhead to raid a modest row house at 80 Ramiles Road in south Liverpool. “I saw policemen outside the house with guns,” a neighbor, Declan Murphy, told the British news agency the Press Association. “They seemed to cover each other going to and from the house pointing their guns at the front door and the upper window.”

Rachal Tansey, 27, said the raid happened after midnight “when I heard dogs barking.”

“I looked out of the bathroom window and saw men with big guns and they barged into No. 80,” she told the Press Association. “There was a bit of a commotion.”

In Scotland, they police searched a house in Houston, a village about 15 minutes drive from Glasgow Airport.

Officers cordoned off a two-story house in Neuk Crescent, a cul-de-sac of gray, pebble-dashed houses, and erected a blue and white tent over the entrance to a garage at the end of the back garden. Plainclothes policemen and women went door to door, talking to residents, while half a dozen officers stood guard in torrential rain.

Several local residents who ducked under the police tape to reach their homes today said they did not know or have any contact with the two Asian men who were living in the house and who they believed were renting it. Estimates given to different journalists of how long the men had lived there varied from two weeks to six months.

John Reid, who lives nearby, said he knew most of his neighbors but had never had any contact with the two men, who were rarely seen around the house or in the garden.

“For all you’d know, it could have been an empty house because you never saw anyone at all,” he said.

Mr. Reid said he was a bit shocked to hear that terrorism had now come to Scotland. “Before, we never had anything like this, it seems quite far away. But now, it’s outside your front door.”

The police declined to say whether the men who lived at the house were suspected of being linked to the airport attack.

Security experts said the police investigation was benefiting from what a Western official called “an unprecedented amount of material to work with.” The police have recovered two undamaged Mercedes sedans in London, while the Jeep Cherokee in Glasgow had been ablaze. Nonetheless, television footage showed, gas canisters from the S.U.V. did not seem to have exploded.

A Western official with access to British and American intelligence reports said it was “not surprising” that a woman had been arrested. In the past, the police have arrested women accused of helping terrorists by failing to report suspects to the police.

But if the 27-year-old woman arrested on the M6 highway is directly tied to the attempted car bombings, “it will be the first time that a female was so involved in a terrorist attack in a Western country,” the official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to brief reporters.

“We’ve always work on the assumption, given that many women share the same ideology as the men, that it was only a matter of time before women became involved,” the official said.

Victoria Burnett contributed reporting from Glasgow, and Raymond Bonner from London.