British police arrested the widow of one of the London suicide bombers of July 7, 2005, along with three other suspects on Wednesday, a source familiar with the operation said. A police statement said a 29-year-old woman and three men were detained in early morning raids in the northern region of West Yorkshire and in the West Midlands.
The source confirmed the woman was Hasina Patel, whose husband Mohammad Sidique Khan was one of four young British Muslims who blew themselves up, killing 52 people, on three London underground trains and a bus. Sidique Khan, the oldest of the four, had trained at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan and is regarded as the ringleader of the group.
Revelation of his involvement in the attacks caused deep shock in his local community, where he had worked as a mentor in a primary school. He and Patel had a daughter who was a baby at the time of the attacks. The suspects held on Wednesday, aged between 22 and 34, are suspected of the commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism.
It was the second wave of arrests within weeks in the vast and long-running investigation into the 7/7 attacks, the first suicide bombings by Islamist militants in Western Europe. 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 in central England.
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