LONDON – The Metropolitan Police arrested a man in connection to the London Bridge and Borough Market attacks that killed seven people and wounded 48 on Saturday night.
“Detectives investigating the London Bridge terror attack have carried out a search warrant at an address in east London in the early hours of Wednesday, 07 June.
“Officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command, supported by officers from the Territorial Support Group, entered the address in Ilford at around 0130hrs.
“A 30-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorist acts (contrary to section 5 Terrorism Act 2006) and has been taken into custody at a south London police station under the Terrorism Act 2000.
“A search of the address is ongoing.”
This is the latest in a long line of arrests and raids. However, late on Monday, police released without charge all 12 people that were initially detained on Sunday in police raids on two addresses in Barking, east London, in connection with Saturday’s terrorist attacks.
Seven of the arrested were women, aged between 19 to 60, and five were men, aged between 28 and 55 years old.
On Tuesday morning, the third and final London Bridge attacker was named as Youssef Zaghba, a Moroccan-Italian man. The other two attackers were Pakistan-born Khuram Shazad Butt and Rachid Redouane.
The police have come under scrutiny following the identification of the attackers because one of them was known to the authorities. The police has since tried to defend itself against criticism over the authorities downgrading an inquiry into Butt, one of the attackers.
Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said that while Butt was known to police and MI5 in 2015, there had been no evidence of a plot:
"There was no intelligence to suggest that this attack was being planned and the investigation had been prioritised accordingly."
Rowley added that the inquiry was "prioritised in the lower echelons of our investigative work" and said he had seen nothing to suggest that this was a "poor decision" when asked by the BBC's home affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw.
Foreign secretary Boris Johnson told Sky News that the police and MI5 are likely to have to answer questions about this decision:
"People are going to look at the front pages today and they're going to say 'how on earth could we have let this guy or possibly more through the net? What happened, how could he possibly be on a Channel 4 programme and be committing atrocities like this?' That is a question that will need to be answered by MI5, by the police, as the investigation goes on."