Such Lovely Lads

The neighbors' tales had a depressingly familiar ring. One arrested man was "as good as gold, a normal lad"; another was a "nice guy" who liked to play soccer in the local park; a third, said someone who lived nearby, was "a very caring boy" who, on learning that her dog had died, said, "If you need me, I'm there for you."

Sweet. But if British authorities are right, those three nice lads and others were involved in a plot to blow airliners traveling from Britain to the U.S. out of the sky. The British last week arrested 24 suspects, one of whom was later released. Most of them were from London, although six were arrested in High Wycombe, a market town between London and Oxford, and two in the city of Birmingham, in the British Midlands. A British official says the group had been monitored for more than a year and intended to use ostensibly innocuous liquids to construct bombs that would then be detonated in flight by disguised iPods and other devices. The British authorities believe that if the group had attempted to carry out the plot, it probably would have been successful.

The dimensions of the plot and similarities to other atrocities in the past two decades strongly suggest that the homegrown jihadists were not acting alone. "There is an al-Qaeda link," says the British official. A possible connection may be Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who left for Pakistan a few years ago, after the murder of his uncle. Rauf, whose brother Tayib was one of those arrested in Birmingham, was detained in Pakistan before the police raids in Britain. Rashid Rauf's arrest was one of the factors that precipitated the decision by the British authorities to roll up the network, on the assumption that news of his detention would soon leak to Britain. Pakistan's Interior Secretary Syed Kamal Shah told TIME that Rauf has ties to al-Qaeda. "He is the key man, a very important man," says Shah. Pakistani sources say more than 20 people have been arrested there in connection with the plane plot, some of them apparently connected to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a fanatic Islamic militant group that is thought to have been responsible for a suicide bombing at the U.S. consulate in Karachi in 2002 and the murder of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl that year. A Pakistani official says Rauf--possibly with others--had been "visiting the same places and people" in Pakistan as two of the suicide bombers in last year's attacks on the London subway.

The path that radical British Muslims take between their suburban homes and Pakistan is by now as depressingly familiar as tales of those radicals' good nature. But it is of vital importance to understanding why Britain has become a key location for international terrorist activity. There are 745,000 people of Pakistani origin living in Britain, and no other nation in the developed world has to deal with the same flow of extremist information and ideologies that is transmitted into Britain, one way or another, from radicals based in Pakistan. "The big problem for the British," says a French official, "is not only the size of their mostly Pakistani Muslim population but also that those Muslims communicate better and more comfortably with people and places back in Pakistan than they do with many elements of British society."