Police Raid London Mosque in Ricin Inquiry By WARREN HOGE
ONDON, Jan. 20 — Police today stormed a London mosque widely depicted as a recruiting ground for violence-prone radical Islam and arrested seven people on charges related to the discovery of traces of the deadly poison ricin in a London house earlier this month.
Acting a day after the government promised a toughening of its anti-terror policy in light of the killing of a police officer in Manchester, 150 policemen in riot gear broke into the Finsbury Park mosque with hand-held battering rams and ladders in a surprise 2 a.m. raid while helicopters circled overhead, bathing the building in floodlight.
The police said the arrests were "linked to" the arrests of four Algerians two weeks ago on chemical weapons and terror charges after the North London apartment where they were captured was found to contain small amounts of ricin.
The police said they found no chemicals on the premises today and said there was no contamination risk to the neighborhood. They said they removed a stun gun, an imitation revolver and a canister of teargas along with a large quantity of computer files and documents including passports, identity cards and credit cards.
The authorities identified the arrested men only as six North Africans aged 48, 40, 38, 31, 28 and 23 and one Eastern European, 22. They were living in residences within the main building and in two adjacent ones, and police stressed that officers did not enter any spaces devoted to worship.
"The Metropolitan Police Service is aware of the sensitivity of such an operation, but evidence gathered during recent counter-terrorist investigations in London and elsewhere has uncovered links between the premises and suspected terrorist activity," Deputy Assistant Commissioner Andy Trotter said.
He told a Scotland Yard news conference that officers had been advised in the planning of this morning's action by Muslim members of the force. They wore nylon covers on their shoes and avoided going into parts of them mosque used for prayer, he said. "We only entered office space and accommodation areas."
The mosque is the base of Britain's most outspoken radical cleric, Abu-Hamza al-Masri, 44, an Egyptian-born imam who has one eye and wears a hook where a hand was blown off by a landmine in Afghanistan 20 years ago.
Mr. Masri, who is wanted in Yemen on terrorism charges, is a supporter of Osama bin Laden, praises the Sept. 11 hijackers as martyrs, calls Prime Minister Tony Blair a "legitimate target" for Muslim warriors and encourages unemployed young Muslims in London to join in the holy war against the West.
He was not among the arrested and said he learned of the raid only when he switched on his mobile phone at 7 a.m., five hours after the police entered the mosque. He said it was part of the "Rambo-like" tactics that police were using in what he called Mr. Blair's "war on Islam."
Mr. Trotter said that Mr. Masri had "nothing to do with this particular raid" and that the timing was unrelated to another action the cleric faces today. He must appear before a religious charities commission that is seeking his ouster from the mosque because of his "inflammatory and highly political" speeches.
Among the people who worshiped at the mosque were Zacarias Moussaoui, The French citizen of Moroccan descent who was arrested in Minneapolis and faces conspiracy charges in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, and Richard C.Reid, the Briton who pleaded guilty in October in Boston to having tried to blow up a U.S.- bound flight from Paris in December, 2001 with explosives hidden in his hiking boots.
Muslim spokesmen, even those who had deplored Mr. Masri and his use of the Finsbury Park mosque to promote violence and hatred of the West, spoke out today against the police action. Mohammed Sekkoum of the Algerian Refugee Council said he had stopped attending the mosque because "I don't agree with all the hatred and the war." But he added, "It is a mistake to trespass in a mosque."
Omar Bakri Mohamed, Syrian-born leader of the radical London-based Al Muhajiroun group, said the raid would serve to increase recruitment. "If they arrest us," he said. "we will become martyrs."
