LONDON:Asians are six times more likely to be stopped and searched by police in Britain than whites, according to Lord Falconer, a senior member of the Labour government.

Lord Falconer, who is also chairman of the National Criminal Justice Board and the Lord Chancellor, said the board was taking up the issue “extraordinarily seriously.”

The comments add to the growing concern that Asians –– particularly Muslims –– have become targets of aggressive policing in Britain after Sept. 11.

Lord Falconer was quoted as saying in The Independent that the high numbers of searches could not be explained by local, social or demographic conditions.

He said: “It’s absolutely critical that people believe that the law is enforced race blind. We have accepted that the disparity in numbers needs to be reduced because the disparity –– between the black and ethnic minority groups that are stopped and the whites that are stopped –– is much too high to be explained simply by different conditions in different places.”

David Blunkett, who has resigned as the Home Secretary last week, is a member of the National Criminal Justice Board.

“You have to make it clear what the position is. You have got to seek to identify what the reasons are and, in so far as they are not for legitimate crime-fighting reasons, stop them,” said Lord Falconer.

The director of public prosecutions said in October this year that a growth in racist crime and a sharp rise in the number of young Asian men being stopped by police threatened to alienate Muslim communities in the country.

Home Office figures show that the stop and searches of Asians under anti-terror laws have soared by 302 percent in a year. At the same time, the figures for race-hate crime revealed an increase of 50 percent in the past two years, with 2,000 more cases being prosecuted than when the law was introduced in 1999.