Controlled explosion on car outside Glasgow mosque
GLASGOW, July 3: Police on high alert after the failed terrorist attacks in Britain carried out a controlled explosion on a car outside a mosque in Glasgow on Tuesday and a Scottish Islamic leader warned of rising hostility toward his community.
Four of the eight suspects in custody in connection with the plots have been identified as doctors, including physicians from India, Iraq and Jordan, and the British news media widely reported that at least six suspects in total were also doctors or trainees.
An eighth suspect _ arrested in Australia _ was identified as an Indian doctor who had lived in Liverpool, and had worked at the same British hospital as one of the doctors arrested in Britain.
Australian police seized a 27-year-old Indian man on Monday at the international airport in Brisbane, where he was trying to board a flight with a one-way ticket, Attorney General Philip Ruddock told reporters. A second doctor was being interviewed.
Mark Shone, spokesman for Halton Hospital in Cheshire, northern England, told The Associated Press that 27-year-old Mohammad Haneef, the man arrested in Australia, worked at the hospital in 2005 as a temporary doctor. Shone also confirmed that a 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool on Saturday worked at the hospital, but he would not provide the man’s name or further details.
Amid stepped-up security at British airports, train stations and on city streets, a bomb disposal team carried out a controlled explosion on a suspicious car parked outside the Fourth Street Mosque in Glasgow, the city where two men attempted to set off a car bomb at the airport on Saturday.
Superintendent Stewart Daniels, of Strathclyde Police, told the British Broadcasting Corporation there was `absolutely no specific information’ of a threat from the vehicle, but that it had been detonated as a precaution.
Police said there was no indication that the mosque had any connection to the bombing attempt in Glasgow, nor to two cars packed with gasoline and gas canisters discovered in London on Friday.
Police were also investigating an attack on an Asian news agent in Glasgow, in which a car was rammed into the shop and caught fire or set ablaze, and an incident near Edinburgh where a real estate office next to a mosque was set afire.
Police have yet to establish if either attack was racially motivated, but Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said tension was increasing.
“While some crimes will be just committed by one person themselves, quite often there are groups of people,” he said. “It suggests there is a rising feeling of hostility where people feel comfortable in the company of others acting in a grotesque fashion.”
A British security official said Pakistan and several other nations were asked to check possible links with the suspects.
Authorities said police searched at least 19 locations as part of the `fast-moving investigation’, which has come at a time of already high vigilance before the anniversary of the suicide bombings in London that killed 52 people on July 7, 2005.
In the latest attacks, two car bombs failed to explode in central London on Friday and two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas cylinders into the entrance of Glasgow International Airport and then set it on fire on Saturday.
The British government security official said investigators were working on one theory that the same people may have driven the explosives-laden cars into London and the blazing SUV in Glasgow.
The unidentified driver of the Jeep was being treated for serious burns at Royal Alexandra Hospital in Glasgow, where he was under arrest. Bomb experts carried out a second controlled explosion on a car at the hospital after a similar blast on Sunday. Police said the car was linked to the investigation, but no explosives had been found.
Authorities identified Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi doctor who worked at the Glasgow hospital, as the other man arrested at the airport.
According to the British General Medical Council's register, a man named Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla was registered in 2004 and trained in Baghdad. Staff at the Glasgow hospital said Abdulla was a diabetes specialist.
A man arrested on Saturday on a highway in central England was also a physician, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, police said. A Jordanian official said Asha was of Palestinian descent and carried a Jordanian passport.
Britain's The Independent and The Muslim News newspapers reported that a man arrested in Liverpool on Saturday was a 26-year-old doctor from Bangalore, India, who worked at Halton Hospital.
Police in Glasgow said two men arrested on Sunday were aged 25 and 28 and detained at residences at the Royal Alexandra Hospital.
Officers would not confirm if the two men were also doctors, but Britain's Sky Television reported — without citing sources _ that they were trainee physicians. —AP
