Glasgow Airport Bomber Left Suicide Note

One of the two men accused of trying to bomb Glasgow airport left a suicide note, it was claimed last night.

The focus is now on the role of Bilal Abdulla, the Iraqi doctor who was a passenger in the Jeep that rammed into the terminal at Glasgow airport

Police were said to have found the note, describing the men's motives and grievances, CNN reported.

Officers suspect that some of the doctors arrested in connection with the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow planned their attacks in Britain. Detectives are also investigating whether the terrorist cell was assembled by radicalised junior doctors in this country. They may have met in Cambridge.

Police sources revealed last night that three of the suspects were related and were raised in Bangalore, India. The other five young medics under arrest are Middle Eastern.

Gordon Brown announced yesterday an emergency review of how foreign doctors were recruited.

It also emerged that police and the General Medical Council were checking the suspects' identities and whether their qualifications were valid.

After a five-day investigation, police are confident that they have all the "major suspects" in custody although not all of those arrested are expected to be charged.

The current terrorist threat level was reduced yesterday from critical to severe. Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said there was "no intelligence" to suggest another attack was imminent.

Police and intelligence sources are sure of the developing links between the suspects.

The focus last night was on the role of Bilal Abdulla, the Iraqi doctor who was a passenger in the Jeep that rammed into Glasgow airport on Saturday. The 27-year-old was studying in Baghdad when the Iraq war broke out. A former tutor last night claimed he had become seriously radicalised and was heavily influenced by the death of friends in the "resistance to the occupation".

Professor Ahmed Ali said Abdulla prayed at a mosque with links to the insurgency and was given good qualifications only "to get him out of the university".

At least three of the suspects are linked to Cambridge. Abdulla lived there briefly and worked at the Addenbrooke's hospital. It is believed that is where he met Dr Mohammed Asha, the neurosurgeon arrested on the M6 on Saturday. There were claims last night that a man arrested in Liverpool, Dr Sabeel Ahmed, was seen in Cambridge with Abdulla.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that Abdulla also associated with members of the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) in Cambridge.

Shiraz Maher, a former member of HT, said: "He used to come to my house. We were extremists ourselves so we didn't really think anything he was saying was worse than us. He used to read a lot of Arabic press and watch al-Jazeera and it gave him a different perspective to us.

"We mixed with other people to try and recruit them and he could have used doctors' digs to meet the others."

Mr Maher said he was introduced to another young Arabic man who was living in the same quarters as Dr Abdulla who could have been Asha.

The disclosures called into question the vetting procedures on Abdulla, who moved to Britain in 2004 and lived in Cambridge before moving to work at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

The families of the suspects yesterday continued to protest their innocence. Mohammed Haneef's mother said he was heading home to see his newborn daughter when he was arrested in Australia.

"He has been apprehended needlessly. My son will never do anything wrong. He is honourable and upright," said Qurat-ul-ain in her flat in a predominantly Muslim district in Bangalore, southern India.

She refused to accept her son's involvement in terrorist activities and added: "He knows the importance of hard work and above all family honour. In my heart, I have been praying to Allah to bring my son back home."

Cradling her eight-day-old daughter, Haneef's wife added: "Just because he is a Muslim he is being targeted."

Ties that bind terror car bomb suspects

Andrew Pierce
Last Updated: 2:25am BST 05/07/2007

A worldwide web of family and professional connections between the alleged car bomb plotters can be revealed by The Daily Telegraph today.

The Middle East connections

Three of the eight suspects are members of the same family from the Indian city of Bangalore, while the families of another two were old friends in the Middle East. Several shared homes in Britain. All but one were doctors working in NHS hospitals.

Detectives are still investigating how the alleged members of the cell came together in the UK but the picture that emerged yesterday was of two distinct, close, groups of young Muslim men, devoted to their faith.

What unites them all is their chosen profession, medicine.

Yesterday it emerged that five of the named suspects were encouraged by their parents, all doctors, to move into medicine - one of the most sought-after professions for educated young Muslims in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

In fact, careers in medicine have become so popular in rich Middle East countries, where universal health care is a priority, that there are no longer enough jobs to go round.

It is why thousands of doctors, trained in the Middle East, have migrated to Britain and Europe, where well-paid work is easy to find.

It is now suspected that some may have come to Britain not just to save lives but to take them too. What is disturbing the police is that the NHS may have provided the network they needed to recruit to their cause.

At the centre of the alleged conspiracy is Dr Bilal Talal Abdulla, 27, the passenger in the Jeep Cherokee which erupted in flames after being driven at high speed into the main terminal at Glasgow airport.

Abdulla, who is still being detained by the police, was born in Aylesbury but it was in the bustling streets of Baghdad, where he was brought up, that he was taught to hate the West.

By the time he had graduated from medical school in the Iraqi capital in 2004 his views - already so hardline that reportedly his mother would not dare remove her headscarf in his presence when he was a schoolboy - had become positively toxic because of the US and British invasion.

Years earlier in Jordan the young Abdulla had met Mohammed Asha, 26, the brilliant brain surgeon who was arrested on the M6 in Cheshire on Saturday hours after the abortive Glasgow attack. The two young men had been introduced by their fathers, who were lifelong friends. They never lost contact.

Abdulla qualified to work in Britain in August 2006 but even the most basic security check by the immigration authorities would have uncovered evidence that he was seriously radicalised. Professor Ahmed Ali, of the University of Baghdad College of Medicine who taught Abdulla, said: "Of course I know him. Who does not know him?" He said Abdulla had been one of the most radical students after the war because of his thinking against the US army and his protests all the time. He formed resistance groups inside the college. He didn't care about his studies. He only cared about resistance and that they should fight the Americans.

" 'We should not learn medicine', he used to say. 'We should learn how to fight the occupation' ."

Abdulla, whose family are Wahabist Muslims, an ultra-conservative form of Islam that promotes Sharia law, has extended family members in Cambridge where he completed part of his training at the city's renowned Addenbrooke's Hospital. He was on the electoral register in 2001.

During his time in Cambridge he was also linked to the radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahir. Shiraz Maher, a former member of the group, said: "He was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq. He supported the insurgency. He loudly cheered the deaths of British and American troops. But to say it was just all about Iraq or foreign policy is mistaken. It feeds off a much wider ideological infrastructure."

Abdulla reportedly once berated a Muslim room-mate for not being devout enough and allegedly showed him a gruesome video of a beheading, warning him the same fate could befall him if he was not more committed to his faith. He allegedly had a number of videos of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qae-da's leader in Iraq, who was killed in a gunfight with American troops last year.

The police are trying to establish whether it was in Cambridge that Abdulla and Asha linked up again. Asha, it seems, also completed two training stints at Addenbrooke's when Abdulla was living in a rented house in the city which was owned by the local mosque. At his home in Jordan, Asha has a souvenir towel marked with the Addenbrooke's logo.

Abdulla had also become close to Kafeel Ahmed, 27, who drove the Cherokee and is now close to death in Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley with 90 per cent burns. Abdulla had worked at the hospital for 11 months, Ahmed for three. They shared a rented house in Houston, a pretty village, five minutes by quiet country road from Glasgow airport.

Further evidence of the close-knit nature of the suspects came with the police swoop on a car in Liverpool on Saturday night.

The driver was Dr Sabeel Ahmed, 26, who worked at the Warrington and Halton hospitals in Cheshire. Ahmed is the brother of the suspect who suffered the life-threatening burns.

The brothers were born and raised in Bangalore, a city at the forefront of India's economic emergence. Bangalore's embrace of western values, has proved fertile ground for radical imams who prefer to preach hatred rather than the Koran.

The brothers studied medicine at Rajiv Gandhi University in the city. Last night Channel 4 News claimed that Sabeel Ahmed visited a brother in Cambridge in 2005 when Abdulla and Asha lived in the city.

In Australia Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, was attempting to leave Brisbane Airport at the weekend with a one-way ticket to India.

He was arrested before he could board the flight. He too came from Bangalore and there is another, closer, connection.

Haneef is a cousin of the Ahmed brothers. He also received his medical degree from the same university in 2002, after studying as part of an affirmative action programme for Muslims and lower castes. He worked as a locum at Halton Hospital at the same time as Sabeel Ahmed. There are two other unnamed suspects under arrest who worked at the Paisley hospital and would, almost certainly, have known their colleagues in the Jeep.

With every hour, new information pours in from around the globe. Detectives must now establish whether the links between the suspects are restricted to family, professional and religion, or whether a more terrifying creed unites them.

Check out this CAIR propaganda column in July 4, 2007 NY Post:

BETRAYAL OF OUR FAITH & PROFESSION

By DR. ASMA MOBIN-UDDIN

July 4, 2007 -- AS THE investigation of the terror plots in London and Glasgow unfolds, I am experiencing the emotions I often do in hearing that people associated with my faith are involved - incredulity, anger, and outrage that once again, these heinous acts are associated with people professing to be Muslims.

But this time, my sense of disbelief and betrayal reaches a new level as I learn that many of those accused share not only my faith but also my profession.

The thought of physicians treating patients while secretly plotting to kill innocent people sickens and angers me on a new level.

It is the ultimate betrayal of the trust placed in them to use their hands for healing, their intellects for diagnosis , and their demeanors to bring comfort to the sick.

As a Muslim physician, I believe the gifts I have been given are entrusted to me by God for the purpose of serving humanity.

Islam teaches me that whatever I do, God is witness to my actions and intentions and I will be accountable to Him.

See the rest at: http://www.nypost.com/seven/07042007/news/columnists/betrayal_of_our_faith__profession_columnists_dr__asma_mobin_uddin.htm

Dr. Asma Mobin-Uddin is a pediatrician in Columbus, Ohio, and the board chairwoman for the Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

British bomb suspect remembered as zealot, loner

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND — In some ways he was the unexceptional product of a privileged upbringing in an educated Baghdad family: an intelligent, pious young man who enjoyed swimming, hiking and socializing at the Iraqi capital's exclusive Hunting Club.

But associates of Bilal Abdulla, a doctor who is accused of riding a flaming Jeep into Glasgow's international airport on Saturday, say he was a religious zealot and a lone wolf whose anger about political developments in Iraq may have driven him to an act of terrorism.

At university, Abdulla was a loner, according to a medical school colleague who graduated alongside him in 2003. "Dr. Bilal was not a normal person: He never had a girlfriend or close friendships with other students," the fellow medical student said.

Shiraz Maher, a former member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir who knew Abdulla in Cambridge, painted a different picture. In an interview on BBC television broadcast Tuesday, he said: "He actively cheered the death of British and American troops. One of his best friends had been killed by Shias."

Maher said that Abdulla had shared an apartment in Britain with a less devout Muslim. "This other Muslim didn't pray five times a day and played the guitar. Bilal said, 'Look, you'd better start praying and stop playing.' He was adamant about it and put on this DVD of al-Zarqawi beheading a hostage,' " he said, referring to the slain insurgent leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. "He said 'If you don't change, this is what we do. We slaughter.'"

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