Advertisement

British manhunt widens

Share
Times Staff Writers

The profile of an extremist cell believed to be behind attempted bombings in London and Glasgow took shape Monday as authorities identified at least three suspects as doctors, two of them from Iraq and Jordan.

Three arrests made Monday brought the number of people in custody to eight, as police pressed an international manhunt for other suspects.

Two men, ages 25 and 28, were arrested in the Glasgow area in Scotland, and a 27-year-old man identified as a doctor was taken into custody in Brisbane, the capital of Australia’s Queensland state, as he tried to board a flight, officials said. The Queensland premier told the Associated Press that a second physician held in Brisbane was being questioned.

Advertisement

Authorities said two key suspects who were arrested over the weekend in Britain are physicians from the Middle East in their mid-20s who arrived within the last three years and worked at hospitals in the Glasgow and Birmingham areas. Suspects in other recent terrorism cases in Britain have been largely British-raised, less well educated men of Pakistani or African descent.

One of the two, Bilal Abdullah, a 27-year-old Iraqi, is believed to be a lead figure in the suspected cell, said a British security official who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case on the record.

Abdullah was the passenger in a flaming Jeep Cherokee that rammed into a terminal of the Glasgow international airport Saturday afternoon in an attempt to cause a massive explosion, the official said.

After a struggle with police and bystanders, a dazed Abdullah was captured along with the driver, who is hospitalized in critical condition with severe burns, the official said.

Investigators suspect that Abdullah also played a central role in the attempt to detonate two explosives-packed Mercedeses left late Thursday near Piccadilly Circus in a bustling tourist and nightlife district of London, the official said.

No one has yet been charged in the attempted bombings in either city, though a judge Monday granted investigators’ request to keep the eight in jail longer. Abdullah and the driver of the Jeep that was filled with propane tanks and gasoline are suspected of executing the frenzied, seemingly improvised assault on the Glasgow Airport as anti-terrorism police were hot on their trail.

Advertisement

The police had quickly pinpointed the suspects’ location using evidence recovered from the Mercedeses, including at least one cellphone intended as a detonator, the car registration and surveillance footage from cameras in London and on highways beyond, authorities said.

“The [closed-circuit surveillance] network incorporates license and registration information automatically, so you can reconstruct the trip a car has taken,” the security official said. “It didn’t take the police long to track down the cars. The whole of London is surrounded by cameras.”

Investigators continue to believe that the attacks were directed or inspired by Al Qaeda.

“At the moment that is the way it looks,” the security official said. “They are definitely looking for more people.”

But the emerging picture of the suspected cell differs from that of previous plots in Britain, and questions persist about the nature of possible foreign links.

The Iraqi and Jordanian doctors’ background breaks with a pattern in recent terrorism cases here, including last year’s plot to bomb U.S.-bound jets and the London transport bombings of 2005.

In those plots and others, most suspects were working-class or middle-class young men of Pakistani or African origin, born or raised in Britain.

Advertisement

The plots were directed by planners and trainers who were based in Pakistan and belonged to the core of Al Qaeda operating in the region near the Afghan border, according to evidence presented in trials and interviews with anti-terrorism officials.

By contrast, the Middle Eastern angle could point to the Iraq war, where a constellation of extremist networks operate, among them an Al Qaeda affiliate that is believed to include a large number of foreign fighters.

Outside the Middle East, Iraqis, Jordanians and others have been active in militant networks in continental Europe. In 2005, a group of Iraqis was arrested in Germany in an alleged plot to assassinate Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister of Iraq at the time.

Moreover, the suspected plan to use consecutive car-bomb explosions last week in London, targeting police and rescue personnel as they arrive at the scene of the first explosion, evokes the tactics of insurgents in Iraq.

But scenarios involving links to Pakistan and Iraq are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

U.S. authorities this year announced the arrest of an Al Qaeda leader named Abdul Hadi, an Iraqi explosives expert who traveled from his base in Pakistan to Iraq as a liaison between Al Qaeda factions.

He is suspected of masterminding plots here, including a case in which five Britons who received paramilitary training in Pakistan were convicted this year of planning to bomb a nightclub and other targets with fertilizer-based explosives.

Advertisement

The suspected cell now under investigation is thought to be ethnically diverse, said Sajjan Gohel of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a security think tank. Authorities did not rule out links to networks entrenched in Britain.

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie told the Associated Press that the suspect arrested Monday in Australia was recruited in Liverpool but completed his medical internship in India.

Abdullah lived with another man at a house in the respectable Glasgow suburb of Houston, officials and his landlord said.

Police were apparently closing in on him shortly before the fiery airport attack at 3:15 p.m. Saturday, his landlord said.

Daniel Gardiner, who heads the rental agency that leases the men their home, told television reporters that police left a card on the door of his colleague at the agency asking him to contact investigators.

The co-worker “had been out for a couple of hours and found the note when he got back at 3:05 p.m.,” Gardiner said. “A couple of hours later, they came back to us with a name and we were able to trace their records.”

Advertisement

Gardiner described the men as “quiet professional people” and ideal tenants.

Abdullah qualified as a physician in Baghdad in 2004 and was granted registration by British authorities last August to practice in Glasgow until Aug. 11, said a spokesman for the General Medical Council, a British regulatory agency.

The other doctor in custody in Britain was identified by the security official as Mohammed Jameel Asha, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin said to be 26 or 27 years old. He has been working as a junior neurologist at the North Staffordshire hospital near Birmingham, according to the BBC and other media reports.

Asha and a woman thought to be his wife were arrested early Sunday as they drove on a stretch of English highway north of Birmingham. Police in protective suits have searched Asha’s home, in a modest residential area of two-story houses outside the northwestern English town of Newcastle under Lyme.

Police believe Asha was “part of the overall operation” targeting London and Glasgow, but “not at all the key guy,” the security official said. Asha qualified as a doctor in Jordan in 2004, British authorities said. He was first granted registration in Britain in March 2005 and had applied for registration until next May, the General Medical Council spokesman said.

On Monday afternoon, Asha’s relatives in Jordan made public statements in his defense. His father, Jameel Abdul-Qader Asha, made an appeal from the family home in Amman, the capital, urging Jordanian King Abdullah II to get involved and clear his son’s name. Foreign doctors who want to work in Britain must provide proof of identification, qualifications, knowledge of English and a certificate of good standing from the medical regulator of their country. They then take an exam, and, if they have a job offer, the General Medical Council will register them for the term of their employment.

The profiles of the suspects raised a number of questions. If they were involved in the attacks, did they become radicalized after arriving in Britain? Or were they already involved in or preparing for extremist activities when they entered the country?

Advertisement

The idea of physicians, engineers and other well-educated, well-off professionals involved in terrorism is not new. Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian who is considered Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, is a physician by training.

“It’s interesting that they are doctors,” Gohel said. “That someone has an important position in a hospital while they are secretly plotting a mass casualty attack is disturbing.”

The case so far presents contradictions typical of Islamic extremism. On the one hand, the cell was able to put together schemes, assemble the bombs and direct them at high-profile targets without being detected by a massive domestic intelligence apparatus that has been on maximum alert since the 2005 transport bombings in London, authorities said.

On the other hand, the crude car bombs in central London failed to inflict damage. And the plotters made elementary mistakes: They left one of the explosives-packed Mercedeses in a no-parking zone, where, as most Londoners know, being towed is all but guaranteed.

Some European counter-terrorism experts watching the case questioned whether the suspects received much training or direction from seasoned militants. “It seems to me, for now, that it looks like a do-it-yourself thing,” said Stefano Dambruoso, a veteran Italian anti-terrorism prosecutor.

rotella@latimes.com

Advertisement

Stobart reported from London and Rotella from New York.

--

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Bomb scares

Friday

* At 1:25 a.m., an ambulance crew treating a patron at Tiger Tiger club in central London spots smoke coming from a Mercedes parked in front of the nightclub and alerts police. Shortly before 2 a.m., a police bomb squad discovers that the car is packed with gasoline, nails, gas cylinders and a detonator. The squad defuses the explosives.

* About 2:30 a.m., another Mercedes, parked illegally on nearby Cockspur Street, is ticketed, then towed an hour later to an impound lot near Hyde Park, about a mile away. Police also briefly close Fleet Street and nearby Chancery Lane to investigate suspicious vehicles.

Saturday

* At 3:15 p.m., two men ram a flaming Jeep Cherokee into the main terminal at Glasgow’s international airport. The driver, who was severely burned, is taken to the hospital. The passenger, after a brief struggle with police and bystanders, is arrested.

* At 8:15 p.m., Britain raises the security alert level to critical, the highest level, indicating terrorist attacks may be imminent.

Source: Associated Press

Advertisement