Trial & terror: On 7/7 anniversary, Jeep passenger appears in court over bomb attacks

on Wednesday 08 July 2009
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Bilal Abdulla faced charges yesterday of conspiracy to cause explosions in London and Glasgow last week. The amateur nature of the attacks is allowing MI5 to 'roll up' the network quickly and reveal new leads on al-Qa'ida sympathisers still at large in Britain.

By Raymond Whitaker and Paul Lashmar

Published: 08 July 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2745133.ece

London yesterday summed up the bizarre mixture of subliminal fear and life as usual that has been our lot since 2001, and the beginning of what some seek to call a global "war on terror". At Westminster magistrates' court, Bilal Abdulla, 27, the passenger in the flaming Jeep Cherokee that crashed into a Glasgow airport terminal a week earlier, was charged with conspiring to cause explosions as the investigation of the latest terror plot against Britain continued to move at extraordinary speed.

The prosecutor made clear that the charges related both to the Glasgow incident and the discovery of two Mercedes cars packed with petrol, gas cylinders and nails in the West End of London on 29 June.

At the same time as Abdulla was being arraigned, crowds were gathering in Wimbledon for the women's final and men's semi-finals; in the Mall to watch cyclists in the Tour de France whizz past Buckingham Palace; at Wembley for the Live Earth concert - and, in smaller numbers, at a memorial garden by King's Cross Station, where a commemoration ceremony was being held for the 52 victims of the 7/7 bombings in London two years before. It was a reminder, if one were needed, of the potential penalty of any lapse in vigilance.

That the capital was not mourning another episode of carnage this summer was due to a combination of luck and the security measures put in place since the bombings of July 2005, according to experts. The would-be bombers could not lay their hands on high explosives or the ingredients, such as fertiliser, from which they could be made. Unlike the 7/7 attackers, they did not have proper detonators, and the ones they tried to make, reportedly using syringes and mobile phones, failed to ignite the petrol and gas cylinders they had stashed in the cars.

The very amateurishness of the London and Glasgow attacks might have made them difficult to detect in advance, but also enabled the police and MI5 to react swiftly.

"We are rolling up this network very quickly, and finding a wealth of leads about al-Qa'ida sympathisers' networks as we go," said a counter-terrorism source.

The dramatic arrest of the two men in the Jeep at Glasgow airport - the driver, Kafeel Ahmed, who has 90 per cent burns, is in a critical condition at Paisley's Royal Alexandra Hospital - was followed by several more, all foreign doctors working for the NHS. Kafeel's brother, Sabeel, who worked at Halton Hospital in Runcorn, was held the same day in Liverpool. Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, and his wife, Marwah, 27, were arrested on the M6 motorway in Cheshire. Two men arrested in an accommodation block at Paisley hospital on 1 July have not been named but are said to be trainee doctors working in the same institution as Abdulla, a British-born, Baghdad-trained physician.

The investigation quickly acquired an international dimension. The Ahmed brothers are from Bangalore in India, where their parents are both doctors. Police in the city were probing their membership of Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim "revivalist" movement - something that brought them into conflict with officials at their local mosque.

There have been claims from Indian and US authorities that some of the sect's members have been linked to al-Qa'ida, though no hard proof has ever been provided. The convicted shoe bomber, Richard Reid, was apparently briefly a member but left because he did not think the group was sufficiently radical.

The secretary of the Masjid-e-Kudadad, opposite the Ahmed family home, said the two brothers had sought to persuade officials to adopt a "more pure" form of Islam. There were arguments and the two brothers were eventually threatened and told to leave. "There was a fight," he said. "There was a problem. It did not go down very well."Kafeel, who has a PhD in engineering, is reported to have told his parents he had obtained work on a "large-scale confidential project" connected with global warming, which would require him to travel a lot, and that there would be periods when they would not be able to contact him. He was working towards an important "presentation".

Indian police have taken computers from the Ahmeds' house, and one unconfirmed report yesterday claimed experts had recovered considerable information from the hard disk, including emails critical of the US invasion of Iraq and in support of al-Qa'ida.

Following a tip-off from British police, another doctor from Bangalore, Mohammed Haneef, 27, was arrested at Brisbane airport in Australia as he prepared to leave for India. Dr Haneef, a registrar at Queensland's Gold Coast Hospital for the past nine months, is said to be related to the Ahmed brothers, and moved to Australia after answering an advertisement in the British Medical Journal.

Several other Indian-born Muslim doctors were briefly held and questioned in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and the Outback mining town of Kalgoorlie, but by yesterday Dr Haneef was the only one still in custody. By late tomorrow he will have to be charged or released, but police are continuing to examine mobile phones and computers containing tens of thousands of files, seized in raids on two hospitals in Western Australia.

he news appeared to allay fears of a plot against Australia, which has never suffered a major terrorist attack on its soil, but it also emerged that the Ahmed brothers had applied several times to work in Western Australia and Queensland. They were turned down because of doubts about their references and qualifications. In the US, the FBI confirmed that Dr Asha and another suspect in Britain had inquired about taking the examination that would permit them to seek residencies in American hospitals.

n Britain the authorities seem convinced that the back of the current plot has been broken. "We have managed to catch these people wrong-footed, before they could destroy evidence, and we have been able to gather up a lot of information," said the counter-terrorism source.

The national threat assessment - raised to the maximum "critical" level immediately after the Glasgow attack on 30 June - had been reduced back to "severe" by Wednesday.

But uncomfortable questions remain. Should the security agencies have been able to head off the attack, or did the idea that doctors might seek to kill indiscriminately seem too outlandish to take seriously? After every attack, failed or not, MI5 finds itself in the same position. First it was asked why it had not known about the alleged conspiracy. Then, when it emerged that some of those arrested had what MI5 call "traces" on their database, the service was criticised for not spotting they were about to carry out an attack."

There is an element of damned if they do, and damned if they don't," said Christopher Langton, a senior fellow for conflict at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. But if it is true that one of those arrested was on an MI5 list of more than 1,600 "priority targets" suspected of active involvement in terrorism, as Anthony Glees, an intelligence expert at Brunel University, has claimed, criticism will mount.

One Whitehall source told The Independent on Sunday: "Over the last several months MI5 has tried to educate the public, and anyone who would listen, that the likelihood now is that if anyone is caught in an act of terrorism, there will be traces or references in their databases. The way the security service works is by collecting and collating information on individuals who could be damaging to national security.

"The Whitehall source said it would be worse if MI5 had no trace of any of the suspects. "If these were all 'clean skins', the public and media could rightly ask what there is to show for the millions of pounds that have been poured into the counter-terrorism network. MI5 has opened eight regional stations. Its staff has been boosted to 3,000 and will increase further to 3,500 by the end of 2008."Paul Rogers of Bradford University believes, however, that behind the doors of London's Thames House MI5 is not as sanguine. "Privately they do not believe they are on top of terrorism in the UK," he said. Despite increased resources, the service sees an accelerating growth of plots and threats: even if more are stopped, more might succeed.And the nature of the threat keeps changing: from the 7/7 bombings by British-born Muslims to last year's alleged "liquid bombs" plot against transatlantic airplanes to the latest attempt, involving professionals."The difference between these and the July 2005 attacks is that these were not UK citizens," said Colonel Langton. "There is also what you might call the 'second XI' view: that these terrorists were trying for spectacle and panic, but did not have the ability to cause mass casualties."Professor Rogers identified another difference. "I think the scenery has changed, in that this was not directed from Pakistan," he said. Al-Qa'ida appeared to be adopting a new approach by sending professionals to form a "sleeper" cell, but had not found a way to train them to make effective bombs.No one should be surprised at the possible involvement of highly qualified professionals in terrorism, according to George Kassimeris, a terrorism expert at the University of Wolverhampton. "It is a grotesque misconception that most terrorists are low-life losers like Richard Reid," he said. Others have pointed out that al-Qa'ida is led by a qualified engineer, Osama bin Laden, and a physician, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri. Although the bombs failed, said Dr Kassimeris, they created fear, "so, to that extent, the attack had some success".Many were shocked that the NHS, which employs thousands of foreign Muslim doctors, was at the centre of the alleged plot. But the expert said it was "a meeting ground rather than a cover", where suspects radicalised each other.Despite the difficulty of dealing with a hydra-headed terror threat, Dr Kassimeris did not exonerate MI5. "It has got to do better, because these people will keep coming back," he said. "We must recruit infiltrators, as MI5 did very successfully against the IRA, even though cultural and religious factors make it more difficult. Otherwise we are depending on luck. If the latest plotters had been a little more competent, the results would have been terrible."But the experts saw encouragement on two fronts. One was the lack of any backlash so far against British Muslims, who were swift to condemn the attacks. Many took part in a rally against terrorism in Glasgow yesterday. Col Langton said: "The Muslim community was very quick to come out against the bombing attempts. Much quicker than in past attacks. I think this may show that the Government has had some success in winning over the Muslim community in Britain."The calm, measured response of the new Prime Minister and Home Secretary were also praised. Gordon Brown appears to accept the argument that terrorism is better dealt with as a criminal conspiracy rather than an apocalyptic threat to our way of life: the one phrase nobody in the Government uttered last week was "war on terror".Additional reporting by Andrew Buncombe in Bangalore and Kathy Marks in Sydney