London – Anti-terrorist officers investigating the July 21 attempted attacks in the British capital arrested nine men today in south London.
Further details on the nine arrests were not available. On Wednesday, British police arrested a Somali man believed to be one of the bombers behind London’s second wave of attacks last week, the biggest breakthrough yet in the investigation of the terrorism that has shaken this city.
Scotland Yard police headquarters said the nine men were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 at two properties in the neighborhood of Tooting. They were being held in a central London police station.
Determined to take theSomali man alive, police seized Yasin Hassan Omar, a 24-year-old British resident, in a predawn raid on a brown brick house in Birmingham and subdued him with a Taser when he resisted.
New evidence also emerged Wednesday suggesting that more attacks could have been planned.
A U.S. law enforcement official said the British authorities investigating the earlier bombings on July 7 had found several devices, assembled as bombs, in the trunk of a car that some of the bombers drove to the train station at Luton that morning before heading to London.
One European intelligence official confirmed that several finished bombs and a variety of bomb components were found in the car.
“Police definitely found material they are very interested in,” the official said.
The existence of the additional devices also could indicate that the attackers were not on suicide missions.
In arresting Omar, dozens of anti-terrorist police and army bomb-disposal experts, some in heavy body armor, raided the ethnically mixed neighborhood in Britain’s second-largest city, evacuating about 100 homes on the tree-lined street where Omar was staying.
“This, of course, is an important development in the investigation,” Peter Clarke, the head of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, said Wednesday in announcing the arrest. Clarke also released a new photograph of one of the four suspects in the abortive attacks standing on a public bus. He said the man had tried to detonate a bomb on a train near the Shepherd’s Bush subway station. The suspect is believed to have taken off and thrown away a dark blue soccer shirt.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.