British police searching for a possible stockpile of poisonous ricin have arrested a seventh man today.
The country was on high alert today after the discovery of traces of the poison in a London flat yesterday.
Anti-terrorist police today said they were looking for three more people in connection with the find after yesterday arresting six north African men who are still in custody.
One security source told Reuters the likely intention was to infect people using a poisoned cream: a scenario that would unleash widespread fear rather than mass deaths.
Medical officials are attempting to quash fears that terrorists have built a sophisticated laboratory to produce a poison so deadly that less than a milligram can kill if ingested, inhaled or injected.
In Wood Green suburb where police found the deadly stash, locals in the large immigrant community voiced fears that Britain's campaign against states such as Iraq might come back to haunt ordinary people at home.
"If we start bombing them, they will come here and do the same thing to us," said one local resident who declined to give his name.
Police fear the traces of ricin and equipment they found in a terraced flat above an pharmacy could be just the tip of the iceberg. Security sources say they feared large amounts of the poison could still be in the hands of extremists in Britain or abroad, while doctors around the country were on alert for the flu-like symptoms linked to ricin.
"There is serious concern it [the poison] may have been moved somewhere that we don't know about by other people who are at large and determined to carry out an attack," one anti-terrorist police source told the Daily Mirror newspaper.
Britain - considered to be a particular target for attacks because of its strong support for the US-led "war on terror" - has repeatedly warned that its population could be targeted.