Quotes of the Day

It had seemed a straightforward operation. Immigration officials and police, unarmed as usual in Britain, broke into an apartment in a run-down north Manchester suburb last Tuesday, seeking a 23-year-old Algerian who had gone missing after his bid for asylum was rejected. He was to be detained, pending deportation, under anti-terrorism legislation. Instead of one man inside the apartment, however, the police found three, all of them North African.

The detectives immediately checked the identities of the other two men with Scotland Yard, which was investigating the discovery of traces of the deadly poison ricin in a north London flat the week before. Seven arrests of North Africans, mostly Algerians, had followed from that discovery, and police believed there could be others involved.

But the Manchester raid was to have far graver consequences. It ended not just in four arrrests — one the following day — but in the murder of a policeman. The killing happened after the police had been in the apartment for more than an hour. In a violent struggle, five of the officers were injured, four with knife wounds and a fifth with a broken ankle. Detective Constable Stephen Oake, father of three and son of a retired police chief, died from multiple stab wounds to the chest. Charged with the murder (but not with terrorism offenses) was Kamel Bourgass, a 27-year-old North African. Handcuffed, he was led into southeast London's high-security Belmarsh court on Friday in white-hooded police overalls. A slight figure, he was dwarfed by a phalanx of police officers clad in bulletproof vests.

His alleged victim, Oake, was a practicing Baptist who had occasionally served as a protection officer to Prime Minister Tony Blair. The popular 40-year-old was honored across Britain as the first domestic casualty in the U.K.'s fight against Islamic terrorism. His murder in an antiterrorist raid shocked Britain, where the killing of policemen outside Northern Ireland has been rare. There had been British victims of incidents abroad, as well as sporadic arrests and scares at home, but as a former police chief superintendent, Douglas Sharp, says, "We may intellectually know the risks, but until something concrete is acted out on our doorsteps, it always happens in a foreign country or to someone else."

The threat now seems to have hit home. A long public lineup of North African suspects has suddenly appeared in the courts, and the two men arrested with Bourgass in Manchester were also being detained, one under the Antiterrorism, Crime and Security Act, the other under the Terrorism Act of 2000. Four of the seven North Africans arrested after the ricin raid — most of whom were identified as Algerians by French investigators — also appeared in court last week, charged with terrorism offenses and chemical-weapons production. And three other Algerians made court appearances on terrorism charges as well, after being arrested in November amid media reports they were planning a poison-gas attack on the London Undergound — claims the British government denies. None of these men has been convicted. If they are, British authorities will have unraveled an Algerian terror network whose presence in the country had until now gone largely undetected.

Possible links are turning up all the time. Rabah Kadre, one of the three Algerians arrested in November, is alleged to have connections with Abu Doha, an Algerian now in high-security Belmarsh prison suspected of being an al-Qaeda operative. Doha, who is apparently connected with alleged terrorist cells around Europe, is also awaiting extradition to the U.S. as a suspect in the plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on Dec. 31, 1999. Meanwhile, raids last month in Edinburgh and London netted eight further Algerian terrorist suspects, while two Algerians arrested 16 months ago in Leicester — the first suspects to be charged in Britain with direct links to al-Qaeda — were due again in court this month.

Britons were taken aback by the notion of a broad, alleged Algerian network, since Britain, unlike France, has no colonial links with Algeria and hosts a relatively small number of its citizens among its population of 2 million Muslims. It would not be a surprise, however, to Mohammed Sekkoum, chairman of the London-based Algerian Refugee Council, who says that among the many peaceful Algerian asylum seekers to come to Britain over the past two years were some 90 to 100 individuals said to have committed terrorist acts in Algeria. He suggested Britain do something about them, a piece of advice echoed over the years by the French. French investigators have long been frustrated that Britain, with its traditions of free speech and its relatively relaxed controls, has ignored their warnings of Algerian terrorist suspects on its soil.

The French have also chafed at British tolerance for the militant preaching of extremist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri. His sermons attract fundamentalist Muslims to the Finsbury Park mosque, including many Algerians who live in this north London neighborhood. Prominent terror suspects have found inspiration there, including alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, now in a U.S. prison, and Djamel Beghal, a Franco-Algerian who is now in French custody and believed to have taken orders from Abu Zubaydah, a top associate of Osama bin Laden. Some members of the alleged ricin gang are also rumored to have attended the Finsbury Park mosque.

Britain may now be taking a harder line with Abu Hamza. The one-eyed cleric, who lost both hands and an eye to a landmine in Afghanistan, could be suspended from his preaching job by the Charity Commission, which has jurisdiction over the mosque as a registered charity. Abu Hamza has ignored a ban issued last spring accusing him of using his position to deliver extremist rhetoric. The Charity Commission says he must answer complaints this week about "extreme and political" statements.

French impatience with Britain comes from the country's long experience of the brutal terrorism of Algerian organizations like the Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.) and its offshoot, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (G.S.P.C.). The G.S.P.C.'s gory combat videos, full of throat slitting, are on sale at radical mosques. Both groups were founded after 1992 elections were canceled by Algeria's military when it became obvious that a fundamentalist Islamic party would win. Osama bin Laden tapped into the Algerians' European cell network in the early '90s, and in 1998 struck an informal alliance with the G.S.P.C., which has since become more powerful than its rival. As the French cracked down on both groups after a series of attacks in the Paris Métro in the mid-1990s, some of the Algerians found sanctuary in Britain. The Algerian hard men recruited and turned to crime, making money from identity theft and document forgery.

"North Africans, but particularly Algerians, have been the most active component of the al-Qaeda network in Europe," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorist expert at Scotland's St. Andrews University. Ranstorp says European intelligence and security services held an unprecedented meeting in the spring of 2001 in Algiers to discuss "what to do about the Algerian dimension." Now, at last, they have swung into action.

• HELEN GIBSON/London
• The race to uncover a web of North African terror cells in Britain