Pakistan Link to Terror Arrests As Gordon Brown Defends Operation
Suspects being questions over terror plot exploited lax student visa regulations to enter the UK from Pakistan
Suspects being questioned after one of the biggest anti-terror operations since the July 7 attacks exploited lax student visa regulations to enter the UK from Pakistan, Whitehall sources said today.
As police carried out searches in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe, Lancashire, following the terror raids on Wednesday, the Home Office said student visa checks had been tightened in the last fortnight because of widespread abuses of the system.
There are concerns inside government and security services that the 11 Pakistani nationals being held in the north of England could have gained entry on student visas in order to form a sleeper cell.
The terror operation which led to the arrest of the men, along with one Briton who is said to have roots in the same tribal area they came from, was rushed forward after the country's top anti-terror officer carried papers under his arm detailing the raids as he walked into 10 Downing Street in full view of photographers.
Apologizing for the blunder, Bob Quick, the Met's head of specialist operations, resigned from his post this morning. His departure immediately reignited tensions over the running of the force after London mayor Boris Johnson broke the news of the resignation on BBC Radio 4, angering the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and Scotland Yard.
Despite the embarrassing gaffe, security sources said the operation was a success, describing it as an unprecedented joint action by MI5 and MI6 in light of intelligence and following weeks of surveillance. They said the plot indicated al-Qaida was adopting new tactics to send "clean skins" – people who are not known to security services or the police – into the country from abroad rather than the established tactic of using "home grown" British-born terrorists to carry out attacks.
But as Gordon Brown talked of the police foiling a "very big terrorist plot", counterterrorist sources admitted that despite intense surveillance they had uncovered no definite targets for an alleged plot. Asked if this would become another high-profile raid ending with no one charged with terror offences, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, Peter Fahy, said: "There will always be situations where … either we can't achieve the evidential threshold or as a result of the investigation we find that the threat was not how it appeared to us at the time."
But he said public safety had to be the number one priority, and officers had decided to take action because they perceived there was a threat.
Greater Manchester police, which was co-ordinating the anti-terror arrests, said several properties were being searched. They refused to comment on what had been found, but if the threat was as great as counterterror sources suggested, officers would have been looking for bomb-making equipment and seizing computers to search for evidence of a cell in operation.
Police were busy at five addresses in Manchester linked to Wednesday's arrests in the city and on the M602 motorway.
Forensic teams removed several crates of items from a four-star B&B in Clitheroe, Brooklyn House, where the two men who were arrested at the town's new Homebase store had been staying since Monday.
Searches were also being carried out in Highgate Street, Liverpool where five men were arrested, including one from Liverpool John Moores University campus.
Muhammad Adil, a student swept up in the raids at John Moores University, but released after a couple of hours, said one friend was still being held. Adil, from Peshawar, Pakistan, said his friend was an accountancy student from Karachi. Adil had been studying in the UK for two years and met his friend at his part-time job as a security guard for Manchester firm MC securities in December. "They asked me if I knew why I was being arrested – as suspect of terrorism, I was laughing at that. I'm a student. I've been studying for the last two years," he said.
A Home Office spokesman said that student visa regulations had been tightened so that all would-be students had to have their fingerprints checked against terror and police lists and had to be sponsored by a legitimate college or university in the UK.
But only last month, immigration minister Phil Woolas, described how "abuse of the student visa has been the biggest abuse of the system, the major loophole in Britain's border controls".
Last year, 9,000 students entered the UK from Pakistan. As part of the changes British colleges now have to register with the UK Border Agency which last month revealed it had turned down 460 of the 2,100 existing colleges which had applied for licenses to admit international students, because they were bogus establishments sponsoring students as part of an immigration scam.
As questioning of suspects continued , security sources said the police had gone ahead with the arrests after intelligence showed a "clear intent and capability" to carry out a terrorist attack.
The fact that the arrests were made so fast on Wednesday after Quick, the head of counter terrorism in the UK, inadvertently disclosed secret operational details, indicated that MI5 surveillance teams were watching their targets closely. "Things were moving anyway, executive action [arrests] wasn't far off. Quick hastened it," said one well-placed official.
However, senior counter terrorist officials made clear the targets of the alleged plotters were not known. They described reports citing a shopping center and nightclub in Manchester as "wide of the mark". Two Whitehall sources indicated the surveillance operation began a fortnight ago when a foreign intelligence agency passed information to British security services.
Three days ago, the sources said, further intelligence indicated that any attack the cell was planning was "imminent", and the decision was made to arrest the alleged network. However, that sequence of events was disputed by other sources.
As police carried out searches in Liverpool, Manchester and Clitheroe, Lancashire, following the terror raids on Wednesday, the Home Office said student visa checks had been tightened in the last fortnight because of widespread abuses of the system.
There are concerns inside government and security services that the 11 Pakistani nationals being held in the north of England could have gained entry on student visas in order to form a sleeper cell.
The terror operation which led to the arrest of the men, along with one Briton who is said to have roots in the same tribal area they came from, was rushed forward after the country's top anti-terror officer carried papers under his arm detailing the raids as he walked into 10 Downing Street in full view of photographers.
Apologizing for the blunder, Bob Quick, the Met's head of specialist operations, resigned from his post this morning. His departure immediately reignited tensions over the running of the force after London mayor Boris Johnson broke the news of the resignation on BBC Radio 4, angering the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, and Scotland Yard.
Despite the embarrassing gaffe, security sources said the operation was a success, describing it as an unprecedented joint action by MI5 and MI6 in light of intelligence and following weeks of surveillance. They said the plot indicated al-Qaida was adopting new tactics to send "clean skins" – people who are not known to security services or the police – into the country from abroad rather than the established tactic of using "home grown" British-born terrorists to carry out attacks.
But as Gordon Brown talked of the police foiling a "very big terrorist plot", counterterrorist sources admitted that despite intense surveillance they had uncovered no definite targets for an alleged plot. Asked if this would become another high-profile raid ending with no one charged with terror offences, the chief constable of Greater Manchester, Peter Fahy, said: "There will always be situations where … either we can't achieve the evidential threshold or as a result of the investigation we find that the threat was not how it appeared to us at the time."
But he said public safety had to be the number one priority, and officers had decided to take action because they perceived there was a threat.
Greater Manchester police, which was co-ordinating the anti-terror arrests, said several properties were being searched. They refused to comment on what had been found, but if the threat was as great as counterterror sources suggested, officers would have been looking for bomb-making equipment and seizing computers to search for evidence of a cell in operation.
Police were busy at five addresses in Manchester linked to Wednesday's arrests in the city and on the M602 motorway.
Forensic teams removed several crates of items from a four-star B&B in Clitheroe, Brooklyn House, where the two men who were arrested at the town's new Homebase store had been staying since Monday.
Searches were also being carried out in Highgate Street, Liverpool where five men were arrested, including one from Liverpool John Moores University campus.
Muhammad Adil, a student swept up in the raids at John Moores University, but released after a couple of hours, said one friend was still being held. Adil, from Peshawar, Pakistan, said his friend was an accountancy student from Karachi. Adil had been studying in the UK for two years and met his friend at his part-time job as a security guard for Manchester firm MC securities in December. "They asked me if I knew why I was being arrested – as suspect of terrorism, I was laughing at that. I'm a student. I've been studying for the last two years," he said.
A Home Office spokesman said that student visa regulations had been tightened so that all would-be students had to have their fingerprints checked against terror and police lists and had to be sponsored by a legitimate college or university in the UK.
But only last month, immigration minister Phil Woolas, described how "abuse of the student visa has been the biggest abuse of the system, the major loophole in Britain's border controls".
Last year, 9,000 students entered the UK from Pakistan. As part of the changes British colleges now have to register with the UK Border Agency which last month revealed it had turned down 460 of the 2,100 existing colleges which had applied for licenses to admit international students, because they were bogus establishments sponsoring students as part of an immigration scam.
As questioning of suspects continued , security sources said the police had gone ahead with the arrests after intelligence showed a "clear intent and capability" to carry out a terrorist attack.
The fact that the arrests were made so fast on Wednesday after Quick, the head of counter terrorism in the UK, inadvertently disclosed secret operational details, indicated that MI5 surveillance teams were watching their targets closely. "Things were moving anyway, executive action [arrests] wasn't far off. Quick hastened it," said one well-placed official.
However, senior counter terrorist officials made clear the targets of the alleged plotters were not known. They described reports citing a shopping center and nightclub in Manchester as "wide of the mark". Two Whitehall sources indicated the surveillance operation began a fortnight ago when a foreign intelligence agency passed information to British security services.
Three days ago, the sources said, further intelligence indicated that any attack the cell was planning was "imminent", and the decision was made to arrest the alleged network. However, that sequence of events was disputed by other sources.
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