London ? Police said Saturday they had arrested 14 people in and around London suspected of trying to train and recruit others for terror attacks. Two others were arrested in a separate raid in the northern city of Manchester.

Police said the arrests late Friday and early Saturday were not linked to an alleged plot that emerged last month to bomb as many as 10 trans-Atlantic jets or to the July 2005 suicide bombings on London’s transit network, which killed 52 commuters and the bombers.

Fears about homegrown terrorism have been high since the transit bombings, which were carried out by three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican immigrant who grew up in England. Those concerns grew with the Aug. 9-10 arrests of 25 people in the alleged plot to bomb airliners with liquid explosives.

The 14 men, aged between 17 and 48, were being held at a central London police station on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism, police said. Officers were searching homes around the capital, they said. The arrests followed months of surveillance and investigation.

Some of the suspects were apprehended at a south London Chinese restaurant, police said. Among the sites being searched following the arrests was the Jameah Islamiyah Secondary School, a Muslim school near Crowborough, 40 miles south of London, Sussex Police said.

A spokeswoman for Sussex Police said searches at the Jameah Islamiyah school would continue for days and possibly weeks.

The school, on spacious grounds in a run-down former convent, has only nine pupils, ages 12 to 15, according to a 2005 report by the Office for Standards in Education. It also operates as a retreat for Muslim families on weekends.

Local lawmaker Charles Hendry said he had visited the school twice and found those who ran it “happy and friendly.”

He said radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri had reportedly brought a group of followers to the school one weekend, but had been asked to leave by school management. Al-Masri is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for inciting his followers to kill non-Muslims.

The Sunday Times newspaper reported that among the properties raided by police was the London home of al-Masri’s former spokesman, Abu Abdullah.

The two arrests in Manchester came early Saturday as officers searched three houses in the Cheetham Hill area. They were not linked to the London arrests, police said.

The two arrests in Manchester were part of the same investigation that led to the Aug. 23 arrest of a terror suspect who is still being held but has not been identified. The two were relatives of that man, police there said.