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LONDON (Reuters) - Police searching a London mosque which was raided in the country`s biggest anti-terror operation since September 11 say they have found tear gas and a stun gun.
Seven men were arrested at the North London Central Mosque during a police raid that was part of a wider probe into the discovery of ricin poison.
Security services believe the mosque, in the suburb of Finsbury Park, was a centre for recruiting and supporting violent Islamic extremists.
"Police have recovered a stun gun, one blank-firing imitation firearm and one CS gas (tear gas) canister during the search of the Finsbury Park mosque," a police spokeswoman said.
"Police have also recovered a large quantity of documents including passports, identity cards and credit cards. These have been taken away for examination and the search is ongoing."
About 150 police in body armour used battering rams and ladders to raid the mosque in the hours before dawn.
But in a sign of the sensitivity of the operation, the officers wore special covers on their shoes and avoided prayer areas "to show our respect for the Muslim faith", according to a police statement.
Six of the men arrested were north Africans and one was east European. They were taken from inside the mosque and two adjacent homes and are still being questioned.
"These are people involved in terrorist activities, we believe," Assistant Police Commissioner Andy Trotter told Reuters. "The intelligence has been justified by what we have found...a number of very interesting documents."
It was the most dramatic in a series of counter-terrorism swoops in recent months, with the pace quickening after the discovery earlier this month of a small amount of the deadly poison ricin in a flat in the nearby Wood Green district.
The mosque is the base of one of Britain`s most outspoken Muslim clerics, Abu Hamza al-Masri, who won notoriety for praising Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda network, which Washington blames for the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Egyptian-born Masri, who has one eye and wears a hook where a hand was blown off by a landmine, was not arrested.
"DESECRATION"?
He told Reuters the raid was a "barbaric desecration of our mosque", part of an unfair wider "war on Muslims". It was a knee-jerk reaction to last week`s killing of a policeman in an anti-terror raid in northern England, said Masri.
Masri, leader of a group called Supporters of Sharia (Islamic law), said two of the seven men held were security staff and five volunteers who did tasks like cleaning.
"Police believe these premises have played a role in the recruitment of suspected terrorists and in supporting their activity both here and abroad," the police statement said.
Britain has arrested more than 200 terror suspects since the September 11 attacks, with most of those detained said to be north African and mainly Algerian.
A spokesman for Tony Blair said the operation had the prime minister`s full support. "The Islamic religion has been hijacked by a small group of fanatics," he added.
Moderate Muslim groups were uncomfortable with the raid on a place of sanctity but eager to distance themselves from Masri.
Radical Islamists, however, were defiant.
"This raid will increase our recruitment," Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, leader of the radical UK-based al Muhajiroun group, told Reuters. "If they arrest us, we will become martyrs."
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