Stun gun downs London terror suspect

LONDON - British police last night arrested six men in their hunt for the bombers responsible for the failed attacks on London's transport network.

The BBC reported that one man, held after being shot with a Taser stun gun, could be one of the suspects in the July 21 attacks.

The man was taken to London for questioning at a high-security detention centre. Police sources told Reuters that the man was the most significant arrest.

Four of the arrests were in the city of Birmingham, where police used the stun gun during one arrest. Police said they arrested the other two men at a train station in central Britain as they travelled towards London from Newcastle.

The bombs last Thursday failed to go off on three Underground trains and a bus.

The botched bombings occurred exactly two weeks after four suicide bombers killed 52 people in a similar attack. Police have linked the suicide bombers to al Qaeda.

It emerged yesterday that the terror cell which staged the failed attack last week may have brazenly returned to their suspected bomb factory soon afterwards.

Detectives were investigating an eyewitness report that three men returned on July 22 to 58 Curtis House, the tatty north London flat where it is feared the bombings were planned and the weapons prepared.

Inside a nearby lock-up garage forensic officers discovered large quantities of chemicals, which they suspect may have formed the ingredients for at least five rucksack bombs.

They also found traces of the chemicals inside the flat.

The discovery raised fears that the men may have been able to obtain new explosives before again disappearing, possibly to plan further attacks.

When armed police raided the flat on Monday it was empty.

A neighbour yesterday described how at least three men were seen inside the ninth-floor flat on July 22, including one matching the description of Yasin Hassan Omar, a 24-year-old Somali whose bomb failed to explode at Warren St station.

He had been the registered tenant at the flat since February 1999 and is thought to have shared the property for the past two years with three other men, including Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, who tried to blow up the bus.

Tania Wright, 32, said she saw three men in the doorway of 58 Curtis House on Friday afternoon, local time.

"I came out of the lift and saw three guys in the flat they are now searching," she said. "They were obviously nervous. They jumped back inside and slammed the door. It was only when the police carried out the raid that I realised one of them looked like the bomber."

British newspapers reported that Ibrahim had served a jail sentence for knifepoint robberies. He was jailed for five years in 1996 for mugging people with a teenage gang, the Daily Telegraph said.

Newspapers said Ibrahim and another suspected bomber came to Britain as refugees from East Africa and had received welfare payments.

- REUTERS, INDEPENDENT