Original content is nice, very nice, but it can take rather long to concoct. So it is that the lifeblood of the blogosphere is the copying and pasting, and linking to, of (pardon me if my prepositions are in a bit of a twist there) an online newspaper article, interspersed with some comment, hopefully shrewd and maybe sometimes well informed.
But what do I know about a story like this? I’m no anti-terrorist expert. Yet clearly it is of significance (as Alice Bachini also notes) that some bad people are apparently being pursued and captured by some good people, and that we are all somewhat safer as a result. Do we ignore events like this merely because we have nothing much to add?
Anti-terrorist officers are searching a second property close to the home of a suspected al-Qa’eda operative arrested yesterday.
The flat in Gloucester, near to Sajid Badat’s terraced house where explosives were found yesterday, is to undergo forensic examination. Officers executed a search warrant on the property at 1am this morning.
A police van was parked outside the second property, a shop with a flat above it. The shop, directly opposite a police station, was shut up but the curtains of its first-floor flat were open.
And so on. It seems that London’s Metropolitan Police (The Met, as we say here) were involved, which would strongly suggest that London was the target of all this explosive collecting, not some place in rural Gloucestershire.
So, speaking as a Londoner myself, and assuming as I now do that it wasn’t all planted … good!
The Met are somehow involved because it is the force with the specialist anti-terrorist branch (among others) that are used as a national resource. If you’ve been paying attention for the last 30 years you’ll have noted that wherever terrorist suspects are first apprehended they are usually taken to Paddington Green Police Station.