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Watching the police officers come and go, some of them in protective white suits and masks, and seeing the long hours they spent in the top-floor apartment above a local pharmacy, neighbors in North London's multiracial Wood Green section knew that something big was up. Last Tuesday morning they learned just how big. The Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch — as part of a joint intelligence operation with the Special Branch and MI5, Britain's domestic security service — raided premises in North and East London early on Jan. 5 and took six men, all believed to be North Africans, into custody under the Terrorism Act of 2000. (A woman arrested with them was released, and a seventh man was apprehended later.) On Saturday, four of the men — named by Scotland Yard as Mustapha Taleb, Mouloud Feddag, Sidali Feddag and Samir Feddag — were charged with chemical weapons production and terrorism offenses. A fifth man was charged under forgery and counterfeiting laws and a sixth with drug offenses, while a seventh was released into Immigration Service custody.

Found in the apartment above the Guardian Pharmacy was residue of ricin, a poison so lethal that mere grains of it can kill. A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down. But at least two suspects were still missing — and police feared that some of the deadly product was too. Had terrorists got away with enough of the toxin to launch a strike?

While the police and MI5 launched a massive manhunt, news of the poison sent a shiver through London that could not be attributed to last week's icy weather. "This has got everybody on edge," says Sonia Merzoug, a convert to Islam who has lived near the apartment — where one of the suspects was arrested — for the past seven years. "This is a bit too close to home for my liking."

"The baseline anxiety level has been rising since 9/11," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at Scotland's St. Andrews University. Terrorists, he notes, are "looking for low-tech ways of making maximum mayhem." Substances like ricin — what Ranstorp calls "weapons of mass disruption" — fit the bill. As with the post-Sept. 11 anthrax attacks in the U.S., a small number of deaths can trigger a huge reaction.

"Alert, not alarm," was the police message to the public and the health authorities. Although there is no vaccine or antidote for ricin poisoning, the substance is not suitable for killing on a mass scale. In one of Agatha Christie's earliest detective stories, The House of Lurking Death (1929), the killer put ricin in fig-paste sandwiches and a cocktail glass, claiming three lives. Said to be deadlier than cobra venom, the poison works most effectively when injected or ingested.

Ricin is already lodged in the memory of many older Britons. In 1978, in one of the more bizarre political killings of the cold war, Georgi Markov — a dissident Bulgarian writer and broadcaster living in London — died after being shot in his right thigh on Waterloo Bridge with an umbrella rigged to fire a minuscule pellet containing ricin.

Now the Wood Green neighborhood finds itself at the nexus of a web of terror that stretches from Algeria to Afghanistan, Paris to the Pankisi Valley, London to Los Angeles. "Even the successful actions by antiterrorism officials confirm evidence that al-Qaeda's numbers are swelling," says independent French terror expert Roland Jacquard. "Each raid that involves the arrest of several known operatives also turns up names and pseudonyms of people investigators never heard of. These names, which have neither faces nor backgrounds, number in the hundreds now."

Just how the suspects came to be apprehended last week has not been revealed. But information from French antiterrorist investigators confirms that most if not all of them are Algerians, and suggests that core members of their group are so-called Chechen Islamists, an international mix of al-Qaeda operatives (including many North Africans) trained in Afghanistan as well as in camps set up in the Caucasus before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The al-Qaeda camps in Georgia's Pankisi Valley — which until a Georgian security crackdown last year was a lawless haven of guerrillas, drug dealers and kidnappers — specialize, says Jacquard, in training recruits in the use of explosives and in basic chemical terror, including the poisoning of water and food supplies. Indeed, Georgian security sources say the al-Qaeda operatives in the Pankisi region — who moved out in the middle of last year when Georgia began cracking down on them — included Middle Eastern "chemists" skilled in poisons. Many of them, Georgian sources told Time, subsequently ended up in U.S. hands — when Georgians thwarted poison attacks against American citizens and installations in other parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia.

One of the main al-Qaeda lieutenants in the Chechnya-Georgia region, says Jacquard, is a Jordanian known as Abu Atiyya. In addition to overseeing the deployment of militants to training camps, he is thought to play a key role in reassigning trained personnel to terror networks, including setting up sleeper cells in such places as Azerbaijan and Turkey. It's believed that within the last year, Abu Atiyya ordered a group of 15 "Chechens" to gravitate to Europe via Turkey.

Six of those 15, according to French sources, were among nine people arrested in raids last month in La Courneuve and Romainville, north of Paris. Investigators say they have no doubt the groups were working together to produce toxic-chemical bombs. Merouane Benahmed, an Islamist known to have received explosives training in Afghanistan and the Caucasus, was among those arrested in La Courneuve on Dec. 16. Eight days later, Menad Benchellali, a self-proclaimed "chemist" and veteran of Afghan camps and the Pankisi Valley, was caught in Romainville.

Material evidence collected during the Romainville raids leaves little doubt that the cell was planning an attack, French sources say. Subsequent testimony indicated that the plot was to target the Russian Embassy in Paris — to punish Russia for its poor treatment of the Chechens. Whatever the intended target, the toxic potential of the chemicals that Benchellali admits listing or writing out as formulas suggests that an enclosed space, with limited aeration, was the goal — not the exterior of a building. But two other "Chechens" who were part of that network around Paris may have escaped the raids and fled to London. The two, officials say, could be among the seven men — aged from their late teens to their 30s — who were arrested last week. While all of this was still difficult to verify, the details of the case may become clearer this week, when five of the London suspects are to appear in court.

Last month's arrests near Paris followed several sweeps in November, notably the arrest of Slimane Khalfaoui, a French citizen of Algerian origin. Like many suspects taken into custody at around the same time in France and Britain, Khalfaoui — a veteran of fighting in Bosnia and Afghanistan — had been linked to others accused of plotting terror strikes in Europe, such as the alleged plan to bomb Strasbourg Cathedral in December 2000.

Recent suspected Islamic radicals arrested in Europe seem to have a number of factors in common: officials say virtually all trained in Afghanistan, the Caucasus or both; most had direct contact with the captured al-Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah or one of his close deputies, such as Abu Atiyya; and, once back in Europe, many received orders at some stage from Abu Doha, a high-ranking Algerian al-Qaeda operative now imprisoned in Britain. Abu Doha is awaiting extradition to the U.S. for his alleged role in directing Ahmed Ressam, the confessed "millennium bomber," whose plot to attack Los Angeles International Airport was thwarted in December 1999.

Virtually everyone linked to the Strasbourg plot — a network of people that spanned Ger- many, Italy, Spain, France and Britain — has been in contact with Abu Doha. After he was arrested, French sources maintain, the operatives looked to another man, Rabah Kadre, for their orders. But Kadre himself was arrested last November, along with two other North Africans, amid reports — officially denied — that they were preparing a chemical attack on the London Underground.

Who is commanding the European cells now? According to Jacquard, French intelligence officials say Kadre shared responsibilities in Europe with Abu Mossab al-Sarkaoui, a higher-level al-Qaeda official who left Afghanistan before 9/11, around the same time as Abu Atiyya. Intelligence sources believe al-Sarkaoui is responsible for directing the operatives, including kamikaze sleepers that Abu Atiyya sent to Europe. At some point, many of these people seem to have passed through France. "We're now seeing evidence that a new generation of Islamists has filled al-Qaeda ranks — and a good many of them coming from France," says Jacquard. "It's becoming clear that the drama and terrible audacity [of Sept. 11] propelled a lot of fence sitters into the camp of jihad."

While France appears to be a focal point of plotting and transit among al-Qaeda members and sympathizers in Europe, London remains the clandestine center for its logistical, financial, transport and strategic activity. With the latest arrests and the ongoing search for a still-unknown quantity of ricin somewhere in London, fears have increased that the long-dreaded terror attack on the city may be drawing nearer. And experts agree that large numbers of casualties are not needed to meet the terrorists' twisted goals. The spiraling fear factor can wreak havoc as well.

• MARYANN BIRD/London
• Cops find a suspected al-Qaeda lab in London — but only traces of its lethal ricin. Inside the terror web