New York Times -
British authorities froze assets today belonging to 19 of the 24 suspected terrorists it seized early on Thursday to thwart what the government called a major conspiracy by Islamic radicals to attack America-bound airliners

The plot�s tentacles, British officials said, stretched from the suburbs of London and Birmingham to Pakistan. But the officials said little about details of the plot, and refused to comment on speculative reports in the British press about specific aspects.

As it ordered the freezing of the assets, the Bank of England identified the 19 suspects by name and age. All were men between 17 and 35, and most seemed to be Muslim Britons of Pakistani descent. At least three of the suspects, though, were converts to Islam, according to residents near their homes; one of the suspects, Don Stewart-Whyte, 21, had traded a western life for an austere devotion to his new faith under the new name of Abdul Waheed.

Coming 13 months after the July 7, 2005, bombings in the London Underground, the disclosure of the new conspiracy convulsed Muslim groups gathered in mosques and Islamic book stores today. Some protested that their religion was being stigmatized; others insisted that no evidence had been produced to support the official reasons given for the arrests.

�Those arrested are innocent until proven guilty,� said Mohammed Shoyaib Nergat, the imam of a mosque in Walthamstow, east London, where many of the detainees prayed. Mohammad Khaliel, spokesman for a prayer group in High Wycombe, west of London, where several arrests were made, insisted that Islamic leaders in the town �have been putting the broad moderate message of Islam.�

Mr. Khaliel said that the people arrested in High Wycombe �came across as diligent, hard-working, pious people who would pick the litter off the street and put it in the bin.�

Britain, meanwhile, remained on its highest level of terrorist alert � known as �critical� � while travelers at the nation�s airports still faced delays and stringent security patrols.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers were stranded at least temporarily on Thursday as hundreds of flights were cancelled and long security lines snaked through airport terminals. But today, British Airways said that 70 percent of its short-haul flights were operating normally and most transatlantic flights had been restored.

Passengers remain barred form carrying anything onto flights to or from Britain other than a few personal items like wallets, eyeglasses and passports. The ban on carry-on baggage was imposed because of concerns that the accused plotters intended to use liquids hidden in soft-drink bottles or other innocent-looking containers to blend into an explosive mixture once airborne.

Explosives experts said detonators for such improvised bombs could have been hidden in MP3 players or the flashes of disposable cameras.

American security officials imposed somewhat less stringent restrictions on flights other than those to Britain, banning passengers from carrying liquids of almost any kind onto the aircraft but otherwise generally allowing carry-on luggage. Few flight cancellations or delays were reported in the United States today, and the lines at security checkpoints appeared to have returned nearly to normal.

In London, at the center of the apparently foiled terror plot, the city seemed to take the news in stride.

The precise sequence of events leading to the arrests in Britain remained unclear. In Pakistan, a television station quoted the Foreign Minister, Khurshi Mehmood Kasuri, as saying that seven suspects, all British citizens, were arrested there before the wider plot was uncovered in Britain. Other Pakistani officials said that �several� suspects, including Pakistanis and Britons, had been seized in the past 10 days.

Pakistani officials said today that one of the arrested Britons was identified as Rashid Rauf. It was not clear whether he was related to Tayib Rauf, one of the people arrested on Thursday in Birmingham. Pakistani intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said a man aged 27 or 28 and born in Britain had been arrested in Faisalabad.

�Pakistan played a very significant role in breaking this terrorist network,� said Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in Islamabad. She said the investigation was continuing and that the total number of people detained might be higher than seven. �We obviously have leads, but we don�t want to compromise the investigation,� she said.

American officials said the plotters in Britain planned a �dry run,� with the real attacks to follow a few days later. News reports in Britain suggested that the arrests in Pakistan may have touched off a sequence of events that led officials in Britain to move ahead quickly with arrests there.

The suspects held in Britain seemed to fit a familiar mold. Like three of the four bombers involved in the July 7 attacks last year, which killed 52 commuters, the men arrested Thursday were mainly in their late teens and twenties, and were mainly of Pakistani descent.

The Press Association news agency reported that one suspect, identified as Amin Asmin Tariq, 23, was a security official at Heathrow airport. Another, Waheed Zaman, 23, arrested in Walthamstow, was reported to be the head of the Islamic Society at the Metropolitan University of London.

Under Britain�s increasingly stringent counterterrorism laws, the authorities may hold the detainees for 28 days without charging them. It was not clear whether authorities believe more conspirators remain at large in Britain or elsewhere.

The Associated Press quoted an American law enforcement official in Washington as saying that at least one �martyrdom� tape was found during raids across England on Thursday. Such tapes are often used by Al Qaeda and some other militant groups, and a number of American officials have said that the plot bore the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation. But officials in Britain and the United States said it was too soon to know whether Al Qaeda actually had anything to do with the plot.

John Reid, the British home secretary, said that transportation and security officials would meet today to decide just how long the ban on carry-on luggage on British planes would remain in effect, and what other security measures would be taken over the longer term.

Eric Pfanner contributed reporting for this article from London, and Salam Masood contributed reporting from Pakistan