Britain Prepares To Deport 9 Terrorism Suspects to Pakistan

Two weeks after hundreds of police officers staged raids in northern England and arrested 12 men in what Prime Minister Gordon Brown described as “a very big terrorist plot,” the police released nine of them on Tuesday and handed them over to Britain’s border control agency for deportation to Pakistan.

Two other men remained in police custody for further questioning under Britain’s Terrorism Act. Another man had been handed over previously to the border agency for deportation.

A Home Office spokesman, referring to the transfer of the nine suspects to the border agency, said the government was “seeking to remove these individuals on grounds of national security,” suggesting that some kind of plot was still under investigation. A police spokeswoman in the northern city of Manchester, which the British news media had portrayed as the focal point of the plot described by Mr. Brown, said the investigations were continuing.

But Britain’s security agencies appeared to have pulled back from earlier suggestions that they had foiled a major imminent attack involving infiltrators with Al Qaeda sent to Britain from Pakistan on student visas. After the arrests on April 8, senior officials were quoted in British newspapers as saying they had moved against the 12 men after deciding that a bombing attack involving mass casualties was only days from being carried out, probably against a target in Manchester, possibly a crowded shopping center over the Easter weekend.

via Britain Prepares to Deport 9 Terrorism Suspects to Pakistan – NYTimes.com.