U.K.: Raids disrupt terror plot
6 people seized in London, elsewhere; gunfire hits woman
LONDON — British police said Friday that 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 Thursday 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 tear gas into the house in the Willesden area of northwest London, which had been under observation as part of an anti-terrorism investigation, Metropolitan Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu said. He didn’t give details of how the woman was shot.
In footage shot by a witness, what sounds like several shots ring out as police surround the house.
Neighbor 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 the Houses of Parliament on Thursday afternoon. A man was detained near Parliament and the prime minister’s office in Downing Street 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 people, before fatally stabbing a police officer inside Parliament’s gates.
Basu said the Willesden raid disrupted an ongoing plot, but he 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 past four years. Police and security services say they face a challenge monitoring hundreds of people of interest, including Britons who went to join Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria and have returned.
Basu, the United Kingdom’s senior coordinator for counterterrorism policing, said there had been “increased activity to combat terrorism over the last two years,” with police “making arrests on a near-daily basis.”
In 2016, British police arrested 260 people on suspicion of terrorism offenses, 96 of whom were charged.
In Thursday’s raids, a 20-year old woman and a 16-year-old boy were arrested at the address where the woman was shot, and a 20-year-old man was arrested nearby. A man and a woman, both age 28, were arrested when they returned to the house later.
A 43-year-old woman in Kent County, southeast of London, was also arrested.
Police said the suspects were being held on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts. They were being questioned but had not been charged.