LONDON -- British counterterrorism police arrested six people Tuesday in raids across southern England after other detentions in London and the English Midlands.
The detention of three men and three women in Portsmouth and Farnborough, both in Hampshire, and in Greenwich, in southeast London, reflected heightened concerns that the rise of the Islamic State has helped foment jihadism, particularly among young Muslims opposed to British military actions in Muslim regions.
The British Parliament has approved the deployment of a handful of Royal Air Force warplanes on combat missions against Islamic State targets in Iraq.
Fearful of being drawn back into a broader conflict after its withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq in 2009, Britain, like the United States, has ruled out sending ground forces. But it has sent a dozen specialist soldiers to Iraqi Kurdistan to train Kurdish soldiers in the use of 40 heavy machine guns delivered earlier, along with ammunition, equipment and arms supplies from other countries.
The arrests in Britain on Tuesday came a day after three men were detained in central London, part of a series of detentions since Britain raised its terrorism threat assessment to "severe" -- its second-highest level -- in August.
A police spokesman said the latest arrests were "in relation to conflicts overseas" and that they were "not linked to any immediate threat to local communities or anywhere else in the U.K."
Two men, ages 23 and 26, and two women, ages 23 and 29, were arrested on charges related to suspected terrorism, the police said, while a 57-year-old man and a 48-year-old woman were detained on suspicion of failing to disclose information about terrorism.
The 57-year-old man also was held on suspicion of "engaging in conduct in preparation of terrorist acts and arranging availability of money and property for use in terrorism," the police said.
They were not identified by name.
The Press Association news agency said a house in Portsmouth that had apparently been raided by the police was the family home of a British Muslim killed in Syria in December while fighting government troops.
Also Tuesday, the sister of John Cantlie, a British journalist held by the Islamic State, appealed to his captors to re-establish what she called "communication through a channel started by you."
"Sadly, like the families of David Haines and Alan Henning before they were killed, our efforts at reopening dialogue continue to be ignored by those holding John," Jessica Cantlie said in an appeal, referring to two Britons shown in Islamic State videos depicting their decapitation.
John Cantlie, who was abducted in 2012, has appeared in two Islamic State videos reading from prepared scripts to send political messages to Western leaders, notably President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain.
"In this program, we'll see how the Western governments are hastily marching towards all-out war in Iraq and Syria without paying any heed to the lessons of the recent past," John Cantlie said in his second appearance last month. "Not since Vietnam have we witnessed such a potential mess in the making."
In her message to the militants, Jessica Cantlie said, "We had previously been in contact through a channel started by you, but then this stopped for reasons best known to you."
She did not give details of how communications had taken place.
"We strongly challenge those holding John to return to your previously opened channel, to which we continue to send messages and await your response so that in keeping with everyone's wishes, we can restart dialogue," she said.
Using the initials of the Islamic State, she added, "We implore IS to re-initiate direct contact."
Also Tuesday, in a case heard at the Old Bailey court in central London, a prosecutor said that Erol Incedal, a 26-year-old man facing terrorism charges, was carrying an address for former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, when he was stopped in his car last year for a traffic violation. He is also accused of possessing a memory card with a document called "Bomb Making."
Although Incedal, who has denied the charges, had not settled on a target, prosecutor Richard Whittam said, the jury might "think that this address does have some significance" in light of evidence to come. Much of the trial is to be held in secret.
A Section on 10/15/2014