Four arrested over 7/7 London bombings

LONDON, May 9 (Reuters) Four people were arrested today in connection with suicide bombings that killed 52 people in London on July 7, 2005, police said.

Two men and a woman, aged between 29 and 34, were detained at about 0700 hrs local time in the northern region of West Yorkshire, while a 22-year-old man was arrested in the West Midlands.

They are being held on suspicion of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism.

It was the second wave of arrests within weeks in the long-running investigation into the 7/7 attacks, the first suicide bombings by Islamist militants in Western Europe.

Three men were charged last month with conspiring with the four young British Muslims who carried out the bombings on three London underground trains and a bus.

''This is the second phase of arrests ... but there's still plenty to do, and it's not over,'' a security source told Reuters.

PROPERTIES SEARCHED Police said the suspects were being taken to a central London police station to be interviewed by counter-terrorism detectives.

They were searching five houses in West Yorkshire and two flats in Birmingham.

Security sources say a key focus of investigations into the 2005 attacks is to trace people who may have provided logistical support to the bombers.

Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command, said last month he was certain that some people with knowledge of what lay behind the attacks had so far withheld information from police. He said at the time it was highly likely there would be more arrests.

Britain's domestic spy service, MI5, last week issued a rare public defence of its operations after it emerged that its counter-terrorism agents had taken photographs and recorded conversations of two of the suicide bombers, well over a year before they carried out the attacks.

The agency said the men surfaced as unidentified contacts of a group of men under surveillance in a separate plot, and there was no evidence at the time that the two were involved in terrorist activity in Britain.

REUTERS SKB ND1520