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Special Branch officers from Scotland Yard’s elite SO13 unit are in Birmingham and Leicester in an effort to track down alleged militants with links to an Al Qaida-affiliated group which attacked the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria, killing four British hostages.

Detectives have already questioned a number of men in the region who have previously been under surveillance.

The secret raids centred on addresses in Birmingham and Leicester as the security services executed a shakedown of known extremists.

Detectives are particularly keen to trace an Algerian suspect, who was believed to be living in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham, and is alleged to be a high ranking member of Tafkir-Wal-Hijra, which is associated with Al Qaida.

A security source told the Sunday Mercury: “A team of detectives has been sent to the Midlands to gather intelligence from a number of known Algerian Islamists who may have some knowledge of the events that led to the hostage crisis.

“We will be checking their movements and correspondence over the last few months.

“We are especially keen to speak to a high-ranking Algerian suspect who was a leading figure in an Algerian terror group called Tafkir-Wal-Hijra, which is now allied to Al Qaida.

“The suspect falsely sought asylum in the UK in 1998 and is believed to have settled in Birmingham, but has been on and off our radar ever since.”

Hundreds of Algerians are believed to have sneaked into Britain with false papers, claiming political asylum after civil war broke out in Algeria in 1991 when Muslim hardliners clashed with the country’s secular rulers.

The mass influx led to the Algerian ambassador in London to complain to the Foreign Office about its ‘loose legislation’ which he claimed was allowing known Algerian terrorists to operate in the UK with ‘near impunity.’

Most of them belong to the Islamic extremist group The Armed Islamic Guard (GIA).

The GIA and its offshoot organisations, which include Tafkir-Wal-Hijra, aims to overthrow the secular Algerian regime and replace it with an Islamic state.

It began its campaign of violence in 1992 and has claimed responsibility for several hijackings and civilian massacres in Algeria.

More than 120,000 people died during the civil war, including 100 expatriate Europeans living in Algeria.

Several GIA members are known to have settled in Birmingham, but went underground after the GIA was banned under the Terrorism Act along with another splinter group The Salafi Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

A spokesman for the Algerian embassy in London told the Sunday Mercury last night: “We believe there are scores of GIA members still in the UK, with many of them based in Birmingham.

“We know that the GIA produced newsletters which originated in Birmingham and also raised funds in the Midlands until the group was officially banned by the British authorities.”

The GIA and its splinter groups recently announced that they had merged and changed their name to Al Qaida in the Magreb, vowing allegiance to the pan-Islamic group.

A number of British Muslims have been convicted in foreign courts or have fought for, or trained with, terrorist or extreme Islamist groups in North Africa.

Algeria’s communications minister Mohamed Said last week described the kidnappers as a “multinational terrorist organisation” that “wants to destabilise Algeria and push it into the war in Mali”.

And David Cameron said North Africa was becoming a “magnet for jihadists,” making experts fear it could eventually become a springboard for attacks on the West.