U.K. cops shoot woman in anti-terror raids
Heavily armed officers bust 6 on terrorism-related charges
LONDON— British police said Friday they had disrupted an active terror plot with raids in London and southeastern England.
One woman was shot and seriously wounded as heavily armed counterterrorism officers stormed a house in a residential London street.
Six suspects were arrested on terrorism-related charges, police said. The injured woman, who is in her 20s, was in serious but stable condition in a hospital. The woman, whose name hasn’t been released, was under police guard but had not been arrested because of her condition, police said.
Armed officers fired CS gas into the house in the Willesden area of northwest London, which had been under observation as part of an anti-terror- ism investigation, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said. He didn’t give details of how the woman was shot.
In footage captured by a witness, what sounds like several shots ring out as police surround the house.
Neighbour Maxine McKenzie said she saw “a lot of frenetic police activity” and a woman being taken out of the house on a stretcher.
“She was sitting upright and had oxygen on — I couldn’t tell if she was conscious or unconscious,” McKenzie said.
Police said the raids weren’t connected to an arrest by counterterrorism police near Parliament on Thursday afternoon.
Aman was detained near the Houses of Parliament and the prime minister’s office in Downing St. while allegedly carrying large knives in a backpack.
Police said the 27-year-old had been under surveillance.
A security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak about the investigation, named him as Khalid Mohamed Omar Ali. British media said he grew up in London.
He was arrested yards from where an attacker drove an SUV into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge on March 22, killing four, before fatally stabbing a police officer inside Parliament’s gates.
Basu said the Willesden raid disrupted an ongoing plot, but did not elaborate. In both the Willesden and Parliament incidents, “we have contained the threat that they posed,” Basu said.
Britain’s official threat from international terrorism stands at the second-highest level, “severe,” meaning an attack is highly likely.
Counterterrorism police say 13 potential attacks have been foiled in the last four years.
Police and security services say they face a challenge monitoring hundreds of people of interest, including Britons who went to join Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, in Iraq and Syria and have since returned.