Every year since 2003, usually during the summer vacation season, extremists have tried to strike Britain. They succeeded July 7, 2005, when a group of Britons of Pakistani descent killed 52 people in suicide bombings on subway trains and a bus. There have been several close calls, including a failed attack in July 2007 in which suspects tried to explode two car-bombs in a London nightclub district, then rammed a flaming, explosives-packed car into a terminal at the Glasgow airport.

This year, the threat seems to have taken on a new face. Radicals have popped up in unexpected places with diverse backgrounds. Unlike previous cases, they do not appear to have strong links to international networks such as al-Qaeda.

In April, police arrested a 19-year-old student living with his family in an affluent suburb of Bristol and confiscated explosives in his fortified top-floor apartment. The suspect, Andrew Ibrahim, is the son of an Egyptian-born pathologist and a British mother and attended an expensive private school. Authorities said Ibrahim had been a devotee of hip-hop music, worn face piercings and wrestled with drug addiction before developing an intense interest in fundamentalist Islam.

Police began investigating Ibrahim thanks to a tip from an imam who suspected that Ibrahim had been handling explosives, anti-terror officials said. The imam noticed that Ibrahim had burn marks on his hands and reported him to police, officials said.

The investigation has not turned up other suspects, officials said. In contrast, investigators believe Reilly, the suspect in the Exeter explosion, was radicalised and manipulated by extremists. The case is disturbing, officials said, because of Reilly’s vulnerability. They described him as a withdrawn youth from a troubled working-class home who developed mental problems in adolescence.

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