IT WAS just before dawn last Thursday when armed officers from Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch swooped on the home of Sajid Badat and his parents in the maze of narrow streets around Gloucester city centre.

The quiet, hard-working student, who appeared to his friends and family as a devout young Muslim and the “bright star” of his local mosque, was now a suspected terrorist.

Within hours police found about a kilogram of PETN, a powerful military-grade explosive that can be moulded into almost any shape.

The operations were part of a nationwide trawl. On the same day detectives arrested a 33-year-old man and raided several addresses in Birmingham.

Badat’s arrest opened a new chapter in Britain’s war on terror. For the first time since the September 11 attacks on America, explosives had been found in the possession of a suspected Islamist terrorist in Britain.

The most senior police officers are now speaking openly of a “panic” in the hunt for the terror cells. They know they are involved in a race against time. They need to find the terrorists before they strike.

As news of the Gloucester raid spread, people who knew Badat expressed surprise. The 24-year-old Asian Briton was born and bred in the West Country cathedral city. His parents, Mohammad and Zubeida, emigrated from their native Malawi more than 25 years ago.

Sajid, the older of their two sons, attended St James Street primary school in Gloucester before going on to the Crypt grammar in nearby Tuffley where he achieved 10 GCSEs and four A-levels, including physics, chemistry and biology. He left school in 1997.

David Lamper, his former headmaster, recalled: “He was a very cheerful, polite boy who worked very hard and got some good grades. We knew of his devotion to his religion. But there was no inkling of anything more sinister.”

A member of the local Masjid-E-Noor mosque was equally supportive: “I’ve known Sajid since he was a baby. I cannot believe he would be involved in anything illegal. Yes, he attended the mosque regularly and he has led prayers before at Ramadan. But that doesn’t make you a terrorist, does it?” At least six Britons have so far attempted to blow themselves up in suicide operations.They include Asif Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, who last April took part in an attack on Mike’s Place, a bar in Tel Aviv.

Hanif’s bomb detonated, killing him and three other people. Sharif is believed to have fled after his bomb failed, and was found dead in the sea off Tel Aviv the following month.

All the attacks by British bombers have happened abroad. Some fear it is only a matter of time before the bombers strike in Britain, thanks largely to a change of tactics by Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda organisation.

The relative success of the American government and others in tracking down, arresting, imprisoning or killing members of Al-Qaeda may, ironically, be the main reason why the movement has begun a new kind of warfare against western targets. This is based on the use of home-grown rather than foreign terrorists.

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