Author: David Leppard
Publication: The Times
Date: April 12, 2009
URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6078397.ece
Last week's raids were the result of a long
investigation into a wider campaign plotted by an Al-Qaeda chief before his
apparent death
Early last Wednesday evening, Phil Harrow,
a blood service courier from Toxteth, Liverpool, was sitting in front of his
computer in his living room, his attention occasionally distracted by the
sounds of the local children playing football on the street outside his front
window on Cedar Grove.
At about 5.30pm, the peace was shattered and
the children scattered in terror. "Eight armed officers, dressed in black
from head to toe and wearing body armour and ski masks, jumped from an unmarked
white van, screamed at the children to get out of the street and battered
their way into the house two doors down from mine," recalled Harrow.
Within minutes three unmarked police cars
and four large yellow police vans had cordoned off the street and about 30
more officers were shouting at residents to stay indoors with their doors
and windows shut.
Three Asian men were arrested and quickly
driven off. The officers also took away a blue Nissan Micra and a black Vauxhall
Corsa after neighbours told them the vehicles belonged to the men.
It was a pattern repeated across the city
and the northwest of England as police swooped simultaneously as part of Operation
Pathway, which was targeting an alleged Al-Qaeda-driven terror plot aimed
at unspecified targets in Britain.
Elsewhere in Liverpool, a man was hauled out
of a flat above an off-licence on Earle Road, Wavertree, about half a mile
from Cedar Grove. At Liverpool John Moores University across the city, a student
was dragged from the library and arrested.
In Manchester two men were picked up in a
flat in the Cheetham Hill area, another couple were seized in a cybercafe
and a fifth man was arrested on the M602 motorway. Two other men were held
in Clitheroe, Lancashire, where they had been staying at a local B&B.
The arrest of the 12 men - 11 Pakistanis and
one Briton - had been rushed forward because of a career-ending blunder earlier
that day by Bob Quick, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner who
was Britain's chief anti-terror officer.
Quick had been running late for a morning
meeting with Gordon Brown at No 10, at which he was to tell the prime minister
about the raids which had been planned for 6am the next day. In the taxi on
the way, he was reading a document headed Secret: Briefing Note Operation
Pathway. Quick was in such a rush that he forgot to put the document back
in its buff folder before he got out of the cab.
A photographer snatched a picture of the document
which was then transmitted to media outlets around the world. The operation
had to be hastily brought forward by 12 hours.
Thankfully, Quick's error had serious consequences
only for himself - he resigned on Thursday morning - but it added unnecessary
drama and danger to an operation that had already been a close-run thing -
and which security sources fear is part of a much bigger threat.
THE trail to the Manchester raids is thought
to have begun last December with the arrest of 14 suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists
by Belgian police.
