London Police Chief, Sir Ian Blair, held a press conference earlier today announcing that the 15 British Muslims currently held on charges to blow up as many as 10 UK-US bound airplanes were radicalized to jihad in a remarkably short time frame. The arrest of the men last August (originally part of a group of 24 arrested) capped a “year-long investigation that British security services had conducted in cooperation with Pakistani authorities,” — according to Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the Bin Laden Unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist center.

Police Chief Blair is quoted in Reuters as now saying:

“One of the really shocking things … is the apparent speed with which young, reasonably affluent, some reasonably well-educated, British-born people were converted,” London police chief Ian Blair told a conference on Islamophobia. He said the suspects had been converted “from what would appear to be ordinary lives in a matter of some weeks and months, not years, to a position where they were allegedly prepared to commit suicide and murder thousands of people.”

Relationships between British police and the Muslim community of 1.8 million are growing increasingly fractured. The BBC reports that in today’s conference on Islamophobia, Blair spoke to a largely Muslim audience.

“It will not be the police and intelligence services that defeat terrorism, it will be communities,” Blair said. “The most single important component in the domestic defeat of terror in the next decade is the ability of the police to work with communities to do just that.”

Whether or not that is plausible remains to be seen. Earlier in the week, a female Muslim police cadet refused to shake hands with Sir Ian Blair at a public ceremony — on the grounds that her strict religious beliefs did not allow that. Scotland Yard is now at the center of the incident, examining how religious customs weigh up against the responsibilities of law enforcement officers.

In November, England’s domestic intelligence chief, Eliza Manningham-Butler, said that 3,000 MI5 agents were tracking some 200 domestic terror plots involving 1,600 suspects. Of those 300 plots, 30 were considered “Priority 1 conspiracy to commit mass murder.”

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