The message that special vigilance is needed against a terrorist attack is starting to sink in, reports Lynne O'Donnell from London
'This is an urgent announcement. Please evacuate the station immediately," came the voice over the Tannoy at London's Waterloo station just hours after multiple bombs ripped a swathe of carnage through rush-hour Madrid, killing hundreds of people.
As I joined the strangely calm throng in moving towards the escalators and out towards the southern bank of the River Thames, a shard of fear shot through me as I wondered if today was the day that London had been targeted by Islamic extremists for its own spectacular atrocity.
Following the arrests in London this week of nine young men of Pakistani origin, many of them related, under the Terrorism Act, and the seizure of enough chemical fertiliser to create a massive bomb, public complacency about the modern terrorism threat is beginning to dissolve.
Having dealt with terrorism in their midst for more than 30 years, the people of the United Kingdom had been wrapped in a smug kind of knowing. They told themselves that unlike Americans who finally met their enemy face-to-face on September 11th, 2001, Britons were no strangers to extremism.
The picture this week of police in chemical protection suits hauling from an ordinary suburban lock-up an enormous sack of explosives that could have blown up a shopping centre, a train or a major landmark made it clear that the Islamic extremism of today is very different to yesterday's Irish nationalism.
Amid a saturation public awareness campaign by the police, the emergency services and the government, the message that a new vigilance is needed is starting to sink in.
Warnings from Britain's senior policeman, Sir John Stephens, that an attack on the scale of Madrid's March 11th is inevitable, coupled with the hysteria of the tabloid press, have finally pricked Britain's famed stoicism.
"British people will take a lot, and it's obvious most Muslims just want to get on and live their lives," says an engineer who gives his name only as Bernie. "The problem is when they start turning our own system against us, that won't be tolerated."
Caution is creeping into ordinary life at the same time as establishment institutions are beginning to deal with the terrorism threat on a growing number of levels including engaging, rather than enraging, leaders of Britain's almost three million Muslims.
The chattering classes feel safer in the Georgian office buildings of the City rather than the sparkling high-rises of Canary Wharf, which could present a more attractive target for airborne terrorists. Tube stations display posters calling on commuters to report suspicious bags and packages to police.
According to Charlie McGrath, a former SAS soldier who runs security training courses, transport corporations are contracting firms like his to train staff to spot impending attacks and diffuse aggressive situations.
"The logical process is that we will end up with suicide bombings in Oxford Street and people need to be trained to deal with that possibility as al-Qaeda will do whatever they can to succeed. If Britain is too difficult a target, because the security services are well briefed and people are vigilant, then terrorists will go elsewhere," McGrath says.
"The security sector should be engaged more by the government through the consultation process and generic safety standards. People feel there are limited things they can do - they should be given more guidelines and big corporations should be encouraged to train their people. People generally will do things they are asked to do, they just need to be asked to do it," he adds.
Muslims were exhorted from the pulpit yesterday to join efforts to root out extremism from their ranks, as Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, called on imams to be alert to "mischievous elements" provoking "illegal activity" and booklets were distributed among the country's 100,000 mosques stating Islam does not condone violence.
One of Britain's few hate-preaching Islamic leaders, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed of the 800-strong Al- Muhajiroun group, implied Islam was above the law, telling BBC Radio: "Co-operating with the authorities against any other Muslims, that is an act of apostasy in Islam."
Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters: "One of the strategies of terrorists is to divide communities." Some Britons draw comfort from Muhammed's view that an attack on Britain would be contrary to the Koran because the country's Muslims live under a "covenant of security".
This claim has led some experts to dub London the "worldwide centre of terrorism" and as such "the safest city in the world." The British government appears to have bridged its own credibility gap, which yawned wide following revelations that Saddam Hussein probably did not have weapons of mass destruction. That credibility gap had not been helped, ironically, by the lack of terrorist attack during periods of heightened alert.
Police have been given more time to question the eight men, aged between 17 and 32, as experts search for evidence that they are part of the international web of organisations linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network of extreme Islamic terrorism - which stretches across the Middle East and North Africa into Chechnya and Central Asia - following claims by Muhammed that some of the arrested men had left his group because they did not find it radical enough.
As the tentacles of the terrorism octopus link major attacks, including Madrid, Casablanca, Riyadh, Kerbala and others, to bin Laden, apologists who claim that Western civilisation's degradation is the cause of its own problems are fading into the background.
"The threat is very real," says Dr Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrew's University in Scotland, who testified to the 9/11 Commission in Washington on the attackers and counter-terrorism.
London, he says, "has the intelligence architecture because of Northern Ireland and the IRA, and there are advantages in having the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in Europe, and a ring of steel around London - this makes it easier to deal with.
"But the effort has been re-orientated, and, for MI5 [Britain's domestic intelligence service], 75 per cent of all its activity is now terrorism-related," Dr Ranstorp explains. "Unlike the IRA, where you know where people live and you can go and arrest them, here you have to find people with serious involvement with al-Qaeda. It is a minority milieu - there are steps between believing in a message and taking action. We are not talking about a lot of individuals; the key is finding them."
Unlike some analysts who believe that alienation and disenfranchisement is what leads young British men of Pakistani origin into Islamic radicalism, William Durodie, director of the centre for risk management at King's College, London, says they draw confidence in their identity from strong community bonds, which in turn fuels their hatred of Western society.
"Bizarrely, some Asian communities in this country have the remnants of family networks of the past, and that gives them the courage, and combined with the rejection of modernity and westernisation, it becomes a potent mix for people who are prepared to do something about it," he says.
But as investigators in France, Italy and Spain have discovered, dealing with radical Islamic terrorism is like trying to arrest a virus as it mutates and spreads. Al-Qaeda has morphed from a mosaic of nationalistic organisations fighting their own battles, via crossovers of specific individuals, into a mishmash of people and groups that transcend borders.
Dr Ranstorp says one of the major battle fronts for national authorities must be to ensure that a new generation of youngsters do not fall under the influence of the al-Qaeda vision and perpetuate terrorism.
"You have to recognise that there is an ideology at work here, you have to deal withwhat al-Qaeda represents as an ideology, understand how its multiple strands are developing and shifting, work with the different centres of gravity, and counter it," he say.
"It's a fine line how much you restrict the human rights and civil liberties of your society in the name of security and the security services are now very sensitive to providing a holistic approach, defensively and offensively. It's about protection."