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07/24/2005:
"Police swoop on capital's estates as hunt intensifies"
The sight of a dozen police riot vans racing off from outside Brixton police station yesterday afternoon was a dramatic signal that Britain's largest Islamist terror manhunt was gathering pace.Firearms and anti-terrorist officers from across the capital were heading for nearby Tulse Hill, as this area of south London becomes the the centre of the police investigation into last Thursday's failed bomb attacks at Oval, Shepherd's Bush and Warren Street tube stations and on a Number 26 bus in Hackney.
By the early afternoon their target was clear: an address in Scotia Road, Tulse Hill, where it is believed a suspected bomber could be holed up. The scene that followed is by now familiar: armed police in full riot gear, CS gas fired through windows, followed up with a raid by officers in gas masks.
This area of south London, stretching from Stockwell south through Brixton to Tulse Hill, was beginning to look like a war zone. Neighbours described the scene, as police set up an emergency cordon, trapping a children's party inside the police tapes.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, police had swooped on a Stockwell council estate to arrest a Somali suspect who was led away to join another, thought to be Ethiopian, who was seized on Friday at a nearby estate. Both are being questioned in Paddington Green high security police station. A raid on an address in west Kilburn earlier in the day also targeted a house occupied by a Somali family, The Observer has established.
The arrests have led police and the intelligence services to the conclusion that they are now hunting a cell with its origins in the lawless war-torn chaos of the Horn of Africa, long known as a haven for terror groups.
In a dramatic development last night, the investigation unearthed the first tentative suggestion of a link between the cell and the 7 July bombers who killed 52 in attacks in London. A connection has been made between individuals connected to the raids and a whitewater rafting trip to north Wales last year attended by the Leeds bombers, Shehzad Tanweer and Mohammed Sidique Khan.
Stockwell is an ill-defined district where the urban middle classes mix with recent immigrants from the world's war zones, long established Caribbeans and the Portuguese community who have made the area their own.
But that all changed at 10am on Friday morning when police chased a further suspect on to a train at Stockwell underground station, wrestled him to the ground and shot him five times in the head.
Full:guardian.co.uk
Now the magic bullets have moved from the young man's torso to his head. And there's war in the projects, which is nothing new, except for the fact that now it's 'justified.' "The lawless war-torn chaos of the Horn of Africa..." dark-skinned men with 'primitive' bombs (downgraded from 'military-grade explosives).
