More Detail On British Arrests

The Daily Mail is reporting that British authorities moved in on what they believed was a facility to train and indoctrinate youths into an extremist mindset. It was not an overt terrorist training facility, apparently.

Anti-terror police raided what is believed to be Britain's first home-grown jihad training camp in the grounds of a former English ballet school.

They rounded up a network of alleged terrorist recruiters after spying on them at the secluded country mansion.

It is understood the group, which included several recent converts to Islam, were being schooled in fundamentalist ideals associated with Al Qaeda.

Last night, 14 men were being questioned, including at least one man described as a 'high-profile fundamentalist Muslim cleric'.

Months of painstaking surveillance by MI5 culminated in police swooping on a group of 12 men as they sat down to a £4.99 'all-you-can-eat' halal buffet in The Bridge To China Town restaurant in Borough, South London, late on Friday night, after they returned from a trip to the Islamic school.

It was followed by a series of raids at addresses across the capital and a massive police and forensic operation targeting the building and grounds of the Islamic school in East Sussex where they had been staying.

Police said the men were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.

Anti-terrorist police established a three-mile exclusion zone around the former Legat ballet academy in Mark Cross, near Crowborough, now occupied by the Jameah Islameah School, amid claims it was being used by Islamic fundamentalists to train teenage Muslim boys.

It is believed the action was sanctioned under tough anti-terrorism legislation banning 'incitement of terrorism'.

Whitehall security sources with first-hand knowledge of the operations said the raids were sparked by detailed intelligence about the activities of a group of 'terrorist recruiters'.

Security officials believe the network was involved in 'recruiting people to the extremist Islamic cause' and putting the raw recruits through 'intensive training and indoctrination'.

This may actually be a worse form of training than overt military style training in the long run. This is the sort of thing the Ottomans did. Build a force of indoctrinated youths. That did not, in the end, work out real well.

UPDATE: Agam over at Agam's Gecko catches a major error in coverage of this story by the media. It sems that the school in question has a website that describes its admission policy: "We only admit students aged between 16-65." Somewhere in that rather broad age group, people generally stop being referred to as "youths".

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