Doctor guilty in London-Glasgow bomb plot

An Iraqi doctor who planted car bombs in the heart of London and tried to mount a fiery suicide attack on a Scottish airport last year was found guilty Tuesday of conspiracy to commit murder.

Bilal Abdulla, 29, was convicted for his role in a terrorist plot that shocked Britain because of the involvement of a medical professional trained to save lives and because of the carnage that was only narrowly averted when the homemade bombs failed to explode.

Abdulla, who was born in Britain but raised mostly in Iraq, was found guilty of joining fellow plotter Kafeel Ahmed in trying to commit murder on what prosecutors said was an “indiscriminate and wholesale scale.”

The two men were described as members of an Islamist cell that sought to punish the West for perceived injustices to Muslims in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

In the early hours of June 29, 2007, the pair unsuccessfully tried to detonate car bombs at sites outside a crowded London nightclub, close to famed Piccadilly Circus, and at a nearby bus stop. After those bombs failed, the men sped north to Glasgow, Scotland, where the next day -- the busiest at the city’s international airport so far that year -- they rammed a Jeep packed with containers of gasoline into the glass-fronted terminal.

The vehicle burst into flames but did not explode. In images broadcast around the world, Abdulla was seen trying to fight off police before he and Ahmed, who had apparently set himself on fire, were arrested. Ahmed, a 28-year-old engineer from India, died of his burns a few weeks later.

A third man, Jordanian neurologist Mohammed Asha, 28, was accused of having given guidance to the two attackers. However, he was acquitted Tuesday on the charges he faced: conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause dangerous explosions.

Abdulla was found guilty of the same charges and was to be sentenced today. He could receive a maximum sentence of life in prison.

A doctor for Britain’s National Health Service, Abdulla claimed in court that his intent was not to hurt people but merely to frighten them and focus attention on the suffering of Iraqis after the U.S.-led and British-supported overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

“I wanted the public to taste what is going on, for them to have a taste of what the decisions of their democratically elected murderers did to my people,” Abdulla testified during his three-month trial.

But jurors rejected his argument that he was planning a harmless publicity stunt. Prosecutors pointed out that the car bombs had been stuffed with nails to inflict maximum damage and that a laptop computer pulled from the burned-out Jeep contained a draft of what appeared to be Abdulla’s will, addressed to Osama bin Laden and to militant leaders in Iraq and other Muslim parts of the world.

“If you are planning to scare people, you do not pack cars with petrol, gas and nails. If the cars had blown up, those nails would not only have killed but maimed some people for life,” prosecutor Karen Jones said after the verdict against Abdulla was announced. “It was extremely lucky for everyone that night that the bombs failed to go off. Otherwise, it is dreadful to imagine what might have happened.”

Police have said that the crudely rigged devices did not explode because of Abdulla’s and Ahmed’s amateurish bomb-making skills. Cellphones attached to the car bombs in London recorded multiple missed calls, showing that the two men tried repeatedly to detonate the bombs by remote control.

The cars’ deadly cargo was discovered only by accident, after one of the vehicles was towed away for a parking violation and after paramedics noticed smoke wafting out of the other one.

A house in suburban Glasgow used by Abdulla and Ahmed bore evidence that they intended to make more bombs, police say.

Britons were shocked that doctors who were supposedly dedicated to saving lives were accused of trying to cause a massacre. Abdulla’s colleagues testified that he was a caring, committed physician at the Scottish hospital where they worked.

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henry.chu@latimes.com