FBI probes US links to terror plot raids

US government investigators are continuing today to pursue leads related to the alleged foiled plot to blow up flights from Britain.

Meanwhile, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff, said he would adjust new flight restrictions to try to make air travel for passengers “as simple and as easy as possible, as quickly as possible”.

US anti-terror chiefs stressed that that there was no reason for Americans to believe that plotters or others connected with the alleged British terror scenario were in the country.

Nevertheless, the FBI has so far assigned around 200 investigators to track down potential links.

“We operate on the assumption that we don’t have everybody,” White House homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend said. “I never, and I don’t think anybody else in this business ever assumes when you take a case down that you’ve gotten everybody.”

In the two weeks before British authorities carried out a series of raids, arresting 24 people, the FBI asked for legal permission in a significant number of cases to obtain records, conduct searches or surveillance missions in the US.

So far, the increased scrutiny has not turned up evidence related to terror, according to a federal law enforcement source.

The arrests led the Bush administration to put the United States on its highest threat alert for flights headed to across the Atlantic from Britain. Additionally, all other flights were raised to the second-highest alert level.

Two other US counter-terrorism officials said the British suspects placed calls to several cities in the US before their arrests. At least some of the calls were placed to people in New York, Washington, Chicago and Detroit, one said.

The suspects are all British citizens, mostly men in the 20s and 30s of Pakistani descent.

The FBI is expecting the arrests and searches of homes and computers in England to generate another round of leads on possible US ties. But there have been no arrests in the US regarding the plot, officials said.

Dozens of Muslim and Arab people in the US reported being questioned by law enforcers over the past several weeks, community leaders said. But they believed the scrutiny was related to the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, not to the British-based plot.

Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic fear there could still be dozens of people on the loose who participated in the plot, such as by supplying chemicals or money.