"Mohammed," shouted the police. "Take your clothes off! Come out with your hands on your head and you will be all right!"

"I have rights!" came the reply. "I have rights."

Residents of Dalgarno Gardens, a West London housing association estate, described a slightly surreal scene today as the net closed on a suspected suicide bomber and police tried to entice him out of his flat on the top floor of a four-storey brick-built block.

Paul Redfern, a 71-year-old writer and photographer, lives on the first floor of Block E, an adjacent block on the 1930s estate in North Kensington.

The first sign that Mr Redfern had that anything was happening was when he heard a distant explosion or gunfire at around 11.40am - possibly from another siege at Tavistock Place three-quarters of a mile away.

Mr Redfern immediately looked out of his window, only to be waved back inside by armed police already gathered below.

For maybe an hour, the police shouted up to the suspect in Block K, trying to coax him out of the flat without violence, naked or in his underwear so they could be sure he was not carrying a bomb. Then the suspect stopped responding and their message changed.

"They were shouting louder and louder. The police were saying, 'Why can't you come out? Is there someone in there who is stopping you coming out?'," Mr Redfern said. "Then I heard four loud explosions, and since then silence."

He added: "I don't think they were shots. They sounded like gas canisters going off as they forced their way into the flat."

Two hours later, with the suspect - believed to be the prime suspect in the attempted bombing of a Tube train at Oval station - led away in a white protective suit used to protect forensic evidence, police were still searching the area with caution, lowering a camera from the roof to peer into the open window of the flat.

There are 350 flats in 24 separate blocks on the Dalgarno Gardens estate, which is owned by the Peabody Trust housing association. Residents describe them as friendly and multi-ethnic - at least a quarter of the residents are from ethnic minorities.

Almost adjacent to the estate is Little Wormwood Scrubs park, where a fifth bomb said to be identical to those used in last Thursday's abortive bombings was found on Saturday. Half a mile to the east is Westbourne Park Tube station, from where one of the bombers set off last Thursday. That man is still at large.

The road running under that station is Tavistock Crescent, where another suspected suicide bomber was captured in a near-simultaneous operation today. He is believed to be Muktar Said Ibrahim, the 27-year-old from Somalia named as prime suspect in the attempted bombing of a No 26 bus in Hackney.

Both men were captured alive - although it is not yet known if police used Taser stun guns like their colleagues who arrested Yasin Hassan Omar, another of the suspected bombers, in Birmingham on Wednesday - a move criticised yesterday as "incredibly risky" by Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.

Residents described how armed police swept into the Ladbroke Grove neighbourhood and cordons were thrown up as snipers took up position behind parked cars. A police helicoper hovered overhead, apparently surveying both siege scenes.

Janice Dyson, a 46-year-old housewife, was returning to her home in Lancaster Road after a shopping trip to Portobello Road market when she noticed that something was happening at about 11.30 am. She said the area was "full of police tape" and her usual route home across Basing Street was blocked.

In that street, she said, "there was an ambulance, police on one side of the road and on the other side there was a large van with loads of police in. I saw three men with rucksacks who seemed to be being put inside the van. I cannot say what they looked like. They seemed to be quite well dressed. They were not being forced into the van.

"Police just moved us on from where we stood. When I left home about 30 minutes before there was no sign of anything happening and then when I came back there was all this and it was all sealed off.

"I have lived here for 22 years and have never seen anything like this before. It is unreal, like you are watching it happening elsewhere."

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