Suspects Recalled as 'Just Normal Guys'

Several of the suspects lived in Walthamstow, a working-class northeast London neighborhood that is home to many Pakistanis, African Muslims and Polish immigrants. Residents live in brick homes and townhouses, along streets spotted with pubs, market stalls and fast-food restaurants.

For the Friday afternoon prayer service, dozens of Muslim men came to the Darul Uloom Qadria Jilania mosque in the area, around the corner from where police stood sentry outside the home of one of the suspects. The worshipers, some wearing white dishdashas , the traditional Muslim robe, and others wearing blue jeans and backward baseball caps, knelt to pray on a white sheet spread out on the sidewalk in front of the mosque.

After the prayers, several young men denounced the United States, Israel and the British police for what one man called a "war on Islam." Some of the men accused the police of fabricating the terrorist plot and wrongfully arresting their friends.

Such raids and arrests strike a particularly sensitive nerve in England. Police raided a home in Forest Gate, east London, in June and arrested two brothers, shooting one of them, mistakenly thinking the men possessed a chemical bomb. Both men were released without charge.

"This plot never existed!" Abid Aslam, 28, shouted about the most recent arrests to the gathering television cameras.

"It's absolute propaganda, it's all about the Jews and oil," said another man.

The men began chanting, "God is great. God is great."

Ishtiaq Hussain, 25, who grew up in the neighborhood, said he was friends with two of the suspects, Ibrahim Savant and Waheed Zaman. Savant, 25, is a soccer-loving half-British, half-Iranian Muslim convert formerly named Oliver, Hussain said. Zaman, 22, took biochemistry classes and led prayer groups at London Metropolitan University, where he was friends with a diverse group of people, Hussain said.

"He's humble, he's got a big heart. He would never hurt a fly. I mean, he's a nice geezer, he's not an extremist," Hussain said of Zaman. "If evidence does come out that they were plotting something, it would be very hard to digest. Very, very hard."

In the same neighborhood, another crowd gathered along Queens Road outside Zaman's home, in a two-story building next door to the New Stylish Hair Dresser and across the street from the Masjid-E-Umer mosque.

If Zaman was a fanatic about anything, it was the Liverpool soccer team, which he followed in an online fantasy soccer league, said his friends. "The last time I saw him was two days ago. We got together to watch 'Star Wars' together," said one of his friends, who declined to give his name.

"You can't condemn someone with no proof. They are innocent until proven guilty," said another of Zaman's friends.

The British press reported Friday that two of the suspects were white men who recently had converted to Islam. The Guardian newspaper said another suspect worked at London Heathrow Airport, and other news outlets reported that at least one suspect taken into custody was a pregnant woman. British police refused to confirm the reports.

At least four of the suspects lived to the west of the city in a suburb called High Wycombe, according to the Bank of England list. One of the suspects, Assad Sarwar, was a Pakistani man who lived in a two-story brick duplex along Walton Drive with his brother and the rest of his family, neighbors said. Some neighbors, watching from across the street as police in hazard suits walked in and out of the house, said they were befuddled and dismayed by the situation.

John Arnold, 28, who knew the Sarwars, echoed the sentiments of several others trying to understand the arrests: "They were just normal kids."

Staff writer Anushka Asthana in Washington contributed to this report.