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LONDON — Police declared their first arrest yesterday and identified four men whom they suspected of carrying out last week’s London bombings, raising the prospect that western Europe may have suffered its first suicide attack.

Police said it was “very likely” that one suspect had died in the blasts on London’s transport network, which killed at least 52 people and injured 700, and were trying to work out if all four bombers had blown themselves up deliberately.

If they did, it would be the first time that suicide bombers, who have wreaked carnage from the streets of New York to Israel and Iraq, have struck in western Europe.

The government has already said last Thursday’s attacks bear the hallmark of fighters loyal to the Al Qaeda movement, blamed for the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the bombing of Madrid’s train network last year.

“The investigation quite early led us to have concerns about the movements and activities of four men, three of whom came from the West Yorkshire area,” said Peter Clarke, head of the anti-terrorist branch of London’s Metropolitan Police. “We are trying to establish their movements in the run-up to last week’s attacks, and specifically to establish whether they all died in the explosions.” He said police had found personal documents with the names of three suspects close to the scene of three of the blasts.

One of the suspects probably died in the blast at Aldgate Underground (subway) station, Clarke said.

Alex Standish, editor of Jane’s Intelligence Digest, said if the suicide bombing theory was confirmed, Britain — accustomed in recent decades to bombings by the nationalist Irish Republican Army — would have crossed a new threshold.

“This is a new level of radicalisation for the UK,” he said. “Suicide bombings are commonly accepted to be the most dangerous and difficult to thwart.”

Seven prime suspects in last year’s Madrid train bombings blew themselves up three weeks after the attacks when surrounded by police in a flat in a suburb of the Spanish capital.

The four men travelled to London on the day of the blasts and were recorded on closed-circuit television carrying rucksacks at King’s Cross rail station shortly before 8:30am, police said.

Three bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other at 8:50am on subway trains that had all passed through King’s Cross. A fourth exploded 57 minutes later on a bus not far away. The revelations came on a day of rapid developments.

Police searched six houses in and around the northern English city of Leeds, including the homes of three of the four suspects. One man, a relative of one of the suspects, was arrested.

Police seized materials that they said might be explosives. Some 500 people were evacuated from red-brick terraced streets in a largely rundown, racially mixed area of the city of 715,000 people.

Police said they had also seized a vehicle in a car park in Luton, which they believed was linked to the attacks.

“I have to tell you that this investigation is moving at great speed,” Clarke said.

The raids came amid growing frustration at what many grieving relatives feel is slow progress in formally identifying the victims of the bombings.

By yesterday afternoon, authorities had named just three of the dead. Two more had been formally identified but their names had not been released. — Reuters