From The New York Times:

Terror Charges as London Olympics Near

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON — British police officials said Thursday that they had charged five people with terrorism offenses but insisted the accusations were not related to the Olympic Games opening here next Friday amid a shortage of civilian security personnel that has forced an expanded military deployment.

The counterterrorism command at Scotland Yard said three men from London were charged late Wednesday with offenses that involved travel to Pakistan for what was described as terrorism training between July 2010 and this month. A woman and another man were charged with having material likely to be useful in terrorism.

The three men from London included Richard Dart, who had appeared in a British television documentary program relating to his conversion to Islam.

At a court appearance on Thursday, Mr. Dart and the other two men, Imran Mahmood, 21, and Jahangir Alom, 26, a former police support officer in London, were ordered held until another hearing on July 31. The woman, Ruksana Begum, 22, and the other man, Javed Baqa, 47, were being held until a court hearing next Friday.

Police officials said that Ms. Begum and Mr. Baqa were carrying copies of Al Qaeda’s English-language magazine Inspire when they were arrested, and that Mr. Baqa had several compact discs containing the work “39 Ways to Support and Participate in Jihad.”

The development followed a rash of security alarms this month during which the police arrested 13 people in a 24-hour period in London and the English Midlands farther north.

At the time, the unusually high number of detentions reflected concerns that when the Games open in London, the event could become the highest-profile target since the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Three of the people arrested were seized in east London, close to the location of the Olympic stadium and village.

Despite official assurances that the arrests were not related to the security of the Games, preparations for the event have been tarnished by the failure of G4S, a huge global security company, to recruit all of the 10,400 personnel it promised to deploy.