A suspected terrorist plot to launch a Mumbai-style attack in Britain has been foiled after police swooped on four men, firing shots as they stopped a car in central London.
The arrested men had been under MI5 surveillance for some time after intelligence was received that they were plotting attacks in Britain, according to security sources.
The operation to stop the men in the street away from their homes was pre-planned, partly because of concerns that they could have weapons.
They are said to have been seeking to get hold of weapons to launch attacks of the kind that killed 164 people in 2008 in Mumbai, India, and last month killed at least 67 people in the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi, Kenya.
The men were arrested on suspicion of committing, preparing or instigating acts of terrorism and taken to the Metropolitan police high security custody suite in south London. On Monday night police were still searching six properties and two cars.
Two men were dragged from a car on Mansell Street, near Aldgate, east London, after it was stopped on the main road by a number of unmarked cars. The two are believed to be a 25-year-old British national of Turkish origin and a British national of Algerian origin, also 25.
Police fired Hatton "breaching" rounds to get into the vehicle, in a move used by special forces to get into buildings.
A British 28-year-old of Azerbaijani origin was arrested at Westbourne Grove, west London, and another British national of Pakistani origin was arrested at a block of flats in Peckham, south-west London.
The last man was named locally as Naveed Baluch. He is thought to be from Karachi and to have attended secondary school in Walworth, south London.
A neighbour described seeing around 20 armed police raid the flat in Peckham and emerge with the man in handcuffs.
The property is home to Rashida Baluch, 57, and her son Naveed, who is the father of at least three young children, said to have recently joined him in the UK from Pakistan.
A neighbour said: "I have spoken to him before; he is a very nice man. We just talked about work and stuff. I've never seen anything suspicious."
The man was said to work at a nearby butcher's shop called Pak Butchers, where staff said he had called in sick on Friday. They said they thought he was in hospital.
In Aldgate, residents in a nearby block of council flats saw armed police in an unmarked Jaguar and a black BMW ram a black Mercedes off the road in front of a Sainsbury store.
Officers banged on the windows and yelled: "Get out of the car," according to witnesses, then used two breaching rounds to get into the vehicle.
They dragged out a man wearing a woolly hat, who was later driven off in an unmarked Ford Mondeo estate car.
The man arrested in west London was held outside an Iranian restaurant called Alounak on Westbourne Grove, an upmarket street lined with restaurants and boutique shops.
George Paul, 30, lives opposite said he saw three cars in the road, one of which appeared to be a Ford Escort.
"I saw three policemen holding down a man on the floor," he said. "They were struggling with him for three or four minutes and I heard him shout: 'Please don't break my arm'."
