So the threat is very real, after all!

Following the pre-dawn operation on March 30, co-ordinated by Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch, in which as many as 700 officers of the MI5, the Metropolitan Police and local police forces took part and a number of locations across Greater London and the Home Counties were raided and several arrests made, a security source said: "We had been telling people for months it is a case of 'when', not 'if'. This is the 'when' we have disrupted. This is not the 'if', this is the 'when'".

The operation, codenamed 'Operation Crevis', took place in nine towns and suburbs and a total of twenty-four premises were raided and eight persons taken into custody. Several further arrests are likely in the very near future, leading from information expected to be extracted from the detainees who are being held and interrogated at London's most secure police station, Paddington Green. A large quantity -- half a tonne to be precise -- of ammonium nitrate was also recovered from a nondescript industrial storage unit located in West London. Ammonium nitrate is basically an agricultural fertiliser produced by combining ammonia with nitric acid and since the 1930s it has been the main from of nitrogen fertiliser used by British farmers. But it has another, lethal, property that makes it the favourite explosive choice for many terrorists.

Combined with a small amount of a booster explosive, like Semtex, to name one, and fitted with a detonator and a timer, the fertiliser turns into a deadly weapon of mass destruction. It had been used by the IRA to make the bombs that wrecked London's Canary Wharf and the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester in 1996, by the Oklahoma City bombers in 1995 and more recently by Islamist terrorists in Bali, Saudi Arabia and Istanbul. And ammonium nitrate is available commercially and legally and being a stable chemical can be stored safely, until a determined terrorist with some knowledge of chemistry decides to turn it into a bomb.

As the Met Commissioner Sir John was speaking before the media, five days after the Madrid bombings, he said: "We do know that we have actually stopped terrorist attacks happening in London but there is an inevitability that some sort of attack will get through." Well, it nearly did, as indicated by the outcome of Operation Crevis, but the threat is still very much alive as a much more scary, chilling fact emerges out of the scenario. All the eight suspects taken into custody -- the youngest of whom is 17, six others aged 18 to 22 and one 32-year old -- are British Muslims. Apparently following a tip-off by US intelligence sources about a section of British citizens of Pakistani origin, they had been under 24-hour covert surveillance for three-and-a-half months, and all of them had been leading "outwardly very respectable" and normal lives in suburbia. The arrests have now confirmed the British security services' worst fear -- that al-Qaida, or some similar fanatic terrorist organisation, has been successful in recruiting middle-class and educated Pakistanis to assume the role of the "enemy within" to carry out terrorist activities in mainland Britain.

The arrests, understandably, have sent shockwaves throughout the Muslim community in the UK. True, the suspects have turned out to be of Pakistani origin, but a considerable number of British Muslims, regardless of their countries of origin, have been subjects of a growing paranoia among the native British population since September 11 and have suffered an upsurge of racist attacks and are now bracing themselves for another backlash of anti-Muslim feelings. Although the Met is trying hard to diffuse their apprehension by assuring Muslim community leaders that the security services know very well that the vast majority of their community are law-abiding citizens who unequivocally condemn anti-British, terrorist violence, the general feeling among ordinary Muslims is a mixture of scepticism and nervousness.

Their scepticism is compounded by the fact that many of them claim they are being harassed by police who use powers of 'Stop and Search' to stop them in the street or in their cars, or even search their homes on flimsy pretexts, and they are subjected to such humiliating treatment for no apparent reason other than that they appear to be Muslim. Lawyers and groups representing the Muslim community in Britain confirm that police activity directed against the Muslims has risen sharply since 9/11. A spokesperson for the Muslim Council of Britain feels that a kind of 'Islamophobia' is growing in the country and "the whole Muslim community is seen as suspect." Another campaigner for a human rights organisation called the '1990 Trust' claims that Muslims are routinely harassed by the police "often when they were wearing traditional clothes or if they had Muslim-style beards…. Muslims understand there is a security threat, but it does not mean they should be treated unfairly."

On the other hand, the Met, while admitting that there has indeed been a dramatic increase in counterterrorist activities, insist that no community is being unfairly treated. "We understand the concerns of the communities who feel they are being unfairly identified with terrorists, but would categorically say that no one is being targeted by police because of their culture or faith," says the Assistant Commissioner in charge of Special Operations: "For us to do so would be the most counterproductive course of action we could take -- because it is not police actions alone that will ultimately defeat terrorism, but the combined actions of all communities." In line with this principle, senior Met officers are regularly meeting with Muslim leaders and encouraging feedback from the community.