UK Muslims feel besieged after plane plot arrests

LONDON, Aug 11 (Reuters) The arrest of 24 people in an alleged Islamist plot to blow up transatlantic airliners could widen a gulf between authorities and British Muslims, who fear their community is coming ''under siege'', Islamic leaders say.

Officials say police thwarted an attack that could have been just days away, involving multiple suicide bombings aboard planes using devices disguised as innocent liquids.

The arrests once again threw a spotlight on Britain's 1.7 million Muslims, 13 months after four young British Islamists killed themselves and 52 commuters in suicide bomb attacks on London's transport system. Four others failed in an alleged attempt to carry out copycat attacks two weeks later.

''There is a siege mentality,'' said Abu Mumin, manager of an east London youth organisation. ''We have to continually justify things that come on the news. We just want to get on with our lives and live peacefully.'' Muhammad Abdul Bari, general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, Britain's largest Islamic organisation, said his community was under more pressure.

''There is always that danger with this sort of publicity.

Also some will just try to demonise Muslims because of the extremism of a very few,'' Bari said today.

''But we think we can overcome it.'' Some Muslims doubt the validity of the police operation, pointing to past high-profile anti-terrorism raids that turned out to be based on faulty intelligence.

In June, 250 police officers, some in special protective suits, took part in a raid on a house in the Forest Gate area of east London acting on a tip-off about a chemical bomb.

However, the two Muslim men they arrested, one of whom was shot and wounded during the raid, were freed and police admitted there was no bomb and the intelligence had been wrong.

In the most damaging incident, police shot dead an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, in July last year after mistaking him for a suicide bomber on an underground train.

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