ceedee's posterous

Section 44 allows police to search any person or vehicle without suspicion

Somebody in London is stopped and searched every three minutes, according to new figures obtained by BBC London.

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

The Met said anti-terror searches had been more widely used since the planting of two car bombs in central London in July 2007.

Terror threat

Of all the stops last year, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%.