52 deaths "not even breakfast" for militant

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - Forward rolls down slopes overlooking one of the most picturesque areas of Britain and pretending sticks were guns while running through woods in the scenic New Forest park -- it doesn't sounds like terrorism.

But police say that far from behaving like overgrown scouts, this was deadly serious militant training.

"Sometimes there's a danger of looking at this sort of activity and not taking it as seriously as it warrants," said a senior counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"There's a danger of trivialising what these people were doing. They were doing paramilitary training for terrorism whether that be for terrorism overseas or at home."

As four men await sentence for running or taking part in the camps, the security official said it would be wrong to treat them as "Walter Mitty" characters or fantasists.

He said a clear demonstration of this was that four men who attended these camps later tried to carry out suicide bombings on London's transport system on July 21, 2005.

Furthermore the organiser of the trips, Mohammed Hamid, who has been convicted for encouraging his followers to kill non-Muslims, was in regular contact with five of the six men jailed for that plot.

Detectives believe the group were planning to go overseas to get more, and better training, with Pakistan and Afghanistan the likely destinations.