LONDON – The ambulance crew was on a routine call: a boozy reveler at the Tiger Tiger nightclub had fallen and banged his head.
But as the medics approached the crowded club just before 2 a.m. on Friday, June 29, something caught their eyes. A pale green Mercedes, parked outside the club’s front door, seemed to be smoking.
Their call to police set into motion an anti-terrorist investigation that has spread from London’s theater district to Scotland, India, the Middle East, the United States and the remote western Australian gold mining town of Kalgoorlie. The investigation centers on what police believe is the first Islamic extremist terror network to use car bombs in Britain, targeting downtown London and the Glasgow airport.
The eight suspects detained by police are highly educated and have overlapping family, work and school connections. Six are foreign doctors or trainee doctors working in British hospitals; two of the doctors inquired about continuing their medical training in the United States. The suspects include a husband and wife, and three members of the same Indian Muslim family.
The only suspect charged so far, Bilal Abdulla, is an Iraqi doctor described by relatives and friends as furious over the Iraq War. Abdulla, 27, was living in Cambridge and occasionally preaching at a mosque there at the same time that four of the others suspects were living or studying in that famous university town.
Police investigators believe Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian citizen with a doctorate in aeronautical engineering also known as Khalid Ahmed, rigged car bombs in London intended for remote detonation, and drove to Glasgow. With police tracing them to that city, they rammed a Jeep Cherokee at high speed into the terminal at the Glasgow Airport in what was intended to be a spectacular suicide bombing.
First charges filed
On Friday, Abdulla was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions in connection with the London and Glasgow incidents. Wearing a white sweatshirt, he made his first court appearance in London on Saturday, speaking only to confirm his name and date of birth.
Terrorism analysts said the plot could be one of the first cases of extremist Islamic organizations in Iraq exporting terror attacks to Europe. Counter-terrorism authorities estimate that a few hundred people who left Europe to go fight in Iraq have now returned. Some of them have been arrested in France, Italy and Sweden on suspicion of plotting local attacks or raising money for terrorist groups.
Three Iraqi men are on trial in Germany after being arrested there in December 2004. German authorities say they plotted to assassinate then Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi during a visit to Berlin. The defendants are accused of belonging to an Iraq-based network called Ansar al-Islam.
In April, the U.S. embassy in Berlin warned of an increased security threat against U.S. installations in Germany. German media later reported that the threat was believed to originate from Iraqi-based terror networks.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he believed the London-Glasgow plot is linked to al-Qaida. A senior British Anglican cleric in Baghdad, Canon Andrew White, said in an interview that in April, he met in Jordan with a man in who he later learned was an Iraqi Sunni insurgent. White said the man warned of attacks on Britons and Americans and concluded with the words, “Those who cure you will kill you.”
“It is far from clear at the moment” if those involved in the London-Glasgow attempted bomb attacks “were radicalized before coming here or after,” said one British government security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the official added, “We have to be open to the possibility of people returning from Iraq.”
Filled with gas and nails
Police officers who were called to check the Mercedes near the Tiger Tiger club in the early hours of June 29 noticed that the back seat was filled with propane gas cylinders. They opened the car and found it also contained roofing nails to act as shrapnel and a cellphone rigged as a detonator.
As a bomb squad worked on that car, a tow truck crew was putting the hook on a blue Mercedes parked illegally nearby on Cockspur Street. They towed the car to an impound lot near Hyde Park, where attendants didn’t notice that it, too, was packed with propane and nails. Not until hours later, when news of the first car bomb was all over television and radio, did attendants notice the odor of gas coming from the Mercedes in the garage.
British news reports said that the bombers called the cellphones several times in an attempt to detonate the bombs but failed. The dud bombs left police with a treasure chest of evidence, including the record of calls made and received on the phones.
At 2:45 p.m. the next day, detectives came to the offices of the Paisley Taxi Company in Glasgow, which had received more than a dozen phone calls for cabs from the cell phones found in London. Twenty-six minutes later, at 3:11 p.m., as company officials went through call records with police, a Jeep Cherokee filled with gas cylinders rammed the main entrance of the Glasgow airport’s passenger terminal and burst into flames.
Two men emerged from the car. Witnesses said a man who police later identified as Ahmed poured more fuel on the fire and on himself.
Bystanders and police wrestled the two to the ground. Police officer Stewart Ferguson told reporters that when he approached Ahmed, “He was well ablaze, clothing, hair, skin, and from the attitude he was in, lying on his back, there was a kind of resignation about him, as if he had resigned himself to death.”
First attempt failed
The Times of India newspaper has quoted relatives as saying that the morning of the airport attack, Ahmed had phoned home and said “My earlier presentation failed … please pray for me.” He added: “The time has come now.”
He is now clinging to life horrifically burned in a Glasgow hospital. Due to his condition, police have been unable to question the 27-year-old man, who studied at Queen’s University in Belfast and Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge.
Two of his relatives are also in custody. His younger brother, Sabeel Ahmed, 26, a trainee doctor working in a British hospital, was arrested in Liverpool. Another relative, Mohammed Haneef, 27, a doctor working in Australia, was arrested at the Brisbane Airport as he was trying to leave for India.
Australian authorities said they have since questioned at least five foreign doctors working in Australia in connection with the investigation, and have seized computers and other equipment from four hospitals in Western Australia.
The other man allegedly in the Jeep, Abdulla, wanted to martyr himself to protest the Iraq war and the harm he believed it had done to Sunni Muslims, according to a close relative interviewed in Cambridge after the attack, who asked not to be identified because the issue is so sensitive.
Abdulla was born in England while his father was studying medicine. He moved back to Baghdad with his family when he was 2. He earned his medical degree in Baghdad in 2004, returned to England and worked in general medicine at Royal Alexandra Hospital, where doctors said he had been warned about spending too much time reading Arabic-language Web sites while on duty.
Two other men, ages 28 and 25, who lived in doctor’s residences at Royal Alexandra Hospital have also been arrested.
Abdulla “was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq. He supported the insurgency. He loudly cheered the deaths of British and American troops,” an acquaintance, Shiraz Maher, told the BBC. “But to say it was just all about Iraq or foreign policy is mistaken. It feeds off a much wider ideological infrastructure.” Maher is a former member of Hizb ut-Tahir, an Islamic group often accused of inciting violence.
Warning of beheading
Maher said Abdulla once showed a Muslim roommate a video of a beheading, warning him the same thing could happen to him if he were not more committed to his faith.
Abdulla lived in a comfortable two-story home on a pleasant street in a Glasgow suburb, where investigators now suspect he and Ahmed may have assembled bombs. Neighbors said they rarely saw the occupants of the house, although one neighbor said she saw a man washing a Jeep Cherokee there on Saturday morning, a few hours before the airport attack. The neighbor said she thought that was odd, because it was raining.
“People are shocked. Doctors, consultants and surgeons live around here,” said Jeff Heath, who works at Paul’s fish and chips shop near Abdulla’s home. “But I guess that makes it an ideal place to hide.”
Six hours after the airport attack, police staged a dramatic arrest on a highway in central England. At least five unmarked police cars forced a car off the road and arrested its occupants, Mohammed Asha, 26, a doctor working at a Staffordshire hospital, and his wife, Marwah Dana Asha, 27, a former hospital laboratory technician.
Records show that Asha earned his medical degree in Jordan in 2004 and began practicing in Britain in March 2005. He was described as a brilliant student and newspaper photos showed him meeting Jordan’s Queen Noor, a patron of the school in Jordan that he attended.
Several of the suspects seemed to know each other from Cambridge. Maher said that when he lived in Cambridge in 2005, he knew both Abdulla and Kafeel Ahmed. Asha also worked at a Cambridge hospital.
Officials in the United States said Asha was one of the two who inquired about applying for medical training positions in the United States within the past year, but did not pursue the application.
On Saturday in Glasgow, a week after the airport attacks and on the two-year anniversary of suicide attacks on the London public transit system that killed 52 passengers and wounded more than 700 others, about 1,500 people, many of them Muslim, held a anti-terrorism rally in downtown Glasgow.
“Let us be clear, no-one, no-one wants to beat these terrorists more than the Muslim community,” said Osama Saeed, spokesman in Scotland for the Muslim Association of Britain.
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