Did doctors plot terror?

A fast-moving British inquiry pulls in suspects with medical ties.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 3, 2007

LONDON - British police investigating failed car bombings in London and an attack on an airport in Glasgow focused Monday on suspects in the medical profession, including a doctor from Jordan, another from Iraq, and medical workers or students. As many as five of the seven people arrested so far in Britain appear to have such links.

The inquiry also spread to Australia, where the Australian attorney general, Philip Ruddock, said Tuesday that police in Brisbane had arrested a foreign resident who had been employed there at a hospital.

The apparent connection to medical personnel troubled many Britons used to seeing the profession as a bastion of trustworthiness and benevolence. Many of the staff at Britain's state-run National Health Service hospitals are foreigners. For the public, moreover, the number of health professionals under arrest offered a baffling departure from images of home-grown Islamic terrorists, many with family roots in Pakistan, implicated in previous conspiracies.

Police now are actively investigating whether the same men carried out the attacks in Glasgow and in London, which police had already described as linked in the way they were planned and carried out, the New York Times reported, citing a senior Western official.

Three people were arrested Monday, including the hospital worker in Australia and two other people at a residential facility attached to the Royal Alexandra Hospital close to Glasgow that has become central to the investigation.

British news reports, relatives and a person close to the investigation identified two of the detained medical doctors as Mohammed Asha of Jordan and Bilal Abdullah of Iraq. A 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool over the weekend may also have been either a medical student or a doctor, the New York Times reported.

Asha, 26, was arrested late Saturday when police in unmarked cars boxed in his car on the M6 highway in northwestern England and forced it to a halt. Contrary to earlier reports identifying him as an Iranian Kurd, Asha was said by a Jordanian official to be of Palestinian descent.

Abdullah was seen in amateur recordings as being arrested and led away by the police after two men tried to ram a Jeep Cherokee into the entrance of Glasgow's airport Saturday afternoon. British medical records said he qualified in Baghdad in 2004 and had been licensed to practice in British hospitals as a doctor under supervision since August 2006.

The inquiry spread to Australia because the suspect there had been a roommate of one of the detainees in Britain, an Australian official who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

According to several accounts, police guided by clues from cell phone records had been closing in on two of the attackers just hours before they struck.

There were strong indications Monday that the Scottish police had been on the trail of two of the attackers Saturday morning before they rammed the Jeep Cherokee into Glasgow airport.

Law enforcement officials in the United States and Britain said Monday that intelligence agencies investigating the failed attacks had so far discovered no direct link to al-Qaida personnel or training camps, the New York Times reported.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Sunday that "the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is al-Qaida and people who are related to al-Qaida."

[Last modified July 2, 2007, 23:42:01]