Terrorists' suicide attack on British embassy plot foiled

The men are believed to be the remnants of the so-called "007" terror network, co-ordinated by London based Islamic militants using a series of secret internet sites.

Senior intelligence sources say the group planned to target Western embassies in Copenhagen with the British and American missions at the top of their list.

The arrests came one day before police in Frankfurt arrested three men on suspicion of planning a "massive" attack on US facilities in Germany.

The planned attacks in Denmark were apparently designed to mark the anniversary-of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

Eight suspects were arrested after a surveillance team learned they were mixing unstable chemicals to make deadly TATP inside a block of flats in Copenhagen.

The men, who are aged between 19 and 29 and from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Turkey, are believed to be part of an Al Qaeda network that had received orders from a group of British-based cyber terrorists.

The British group's activities were stopped by an MI5 investigation earlier this year when three men were jailed for encouraging suicide missions using online forums and websites.

Their websites were also used as a secure communications centre by several senior Al Qaeda operatives, including two Bosnian-based terror chiefs known as "Maximus" and "Danish Turk".

The pair were jailed over a plot to mount a suicide attack against a Western embassy in Sarajevo.

And The Mail on Sunday understands that two of those arrested in Copenhagen had been in regular telephone contact with them and under longterm surveillance by Danish intelligence.

It was also the Bosnian pair's arrest that led to MI5's exposure of the British internet gang.

The group - led by an IT expert using the online name Irhabi007, Arabic for Terrorist007 - set up websites from their bedrooms in London and Kent.

Three men, Tariq Al-Daour, 21, Younis Tsouli, 23, and Waseem Mughal, 24, were jailed in London in July after pleading guilty to inciting terrorist murder and conspiracy to defraud.

After the Copenhagen arrests Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish intelligence service PET, said: "With the arrests we have prevented a terror attack. They also have been producing an unstable explosive in a densely populated area."

He said Danish investigators had worked with "several foreign co-operation partners".