Sellafield terror arrests prompt London police raids

Source : The Guardian | 04 May 2011

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Vikram Dodd and Helen Carter

The Sellafield nuclear site near where five men were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
Counter-terrorism officers have begun questioning five men from east London alleged to have been filming near the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria.
Meanwhile, police in London staged the first of a series of raids on addresses linked to those detained. The Metropolitan police said four houses in east London had been searched.
The five were arrested under section 41 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which says a "constable may arrest without a warrant a person whom he reasonably suspects to be a terrorist".
The investigation is at an early stage. Some past arrests by UK counter-terrorism officials have led to people being released without charge.
The arrests have attracted considerable interest because they came hours after the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden. The police say they are not "at this stage" connecting the arrests to the killing of the al-Qaida leader by US special forces, however.
The men were detained at 4.32pm on Monday after a vehicle was stopped and checked by officers from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), which polices the facility in west Cumbria.

• The five, all in their 20s and from London, were held in police custody overnight in Carlisle before being taken to Manchester in the morning, a spokesman for Cumbria police said.

  This morning, the investigation was taken over by the north-west counter-terrorism unit.

  One of the officers involved in the arrests believed the men were thought to have been filming near the nuclear plant.

  The police have not confirmed the ethnicity of the arrested men, though they are believed to be from a Muslim background .

  Greater Manchester police said the investigation was in its early stages and no further information would be released immediately. They were unaware of any connection to the death of Osama bin Laden in the US operation in Pakistan.

  Cumbria police said a road closure affected the area for "a short period of time".

  A spokeswoman for Sellafield confirmed that the five men had been arrested close to the site, saying: "It is a security issue and our security people are having discussions."

  She said the plant had not been evacuated but the investigation had the potential to affect traffic.

  The sprawling coastal site is heavily protected by both private security guards and officers from the CNC, some of whom are armed.

  Sellafield is responsible for decommissioning and reprocessing nuclear waste and manufacturing fuel, on behalf of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

  The site has been operating since the 1940s, when it was used as a Royal Ordnance factory supporting the second world war effort. The site is also home to the world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall, which operated from 1956 to 2003.

  Today the site comprises redundant buildings associated with early defence work, and operating facilities associated with the Magnox reprocessing programme, the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (Thorp), the Sellafield Mox plant and a range of waste treatment plants.

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