October 10, 2008	Friday	Shawwal 10, 1429

LONDON, Oct 9: Two National Health Service (NHS) doctors, one of them presumably of Pakistan origin, plotted “indiscriminate and wholesale” murder in a series of car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow, prosecutors told a court on Thursday.

Mohammed Asha, 28, and Bilal Abdullah, 29, are accused of trying to explode two car bombs in London and attempting a suicide bomb attack on Glasgow airport last June.

Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw QC told crown court that the two men were members of an “Islamist terrorist cell” who hoped to leave the public “gripped by fear” over where they would strike next - playing on anxieties left by the July 7, 2005, attacks in London.

Laidlaw said: “Their plan was to carry out a series of attacks on the public using bombs concealed in vehicles. No warnings were to be given and the cars were to be positioned in busy urban areas.

“In short, these men were intent on committing murder on an indiscriminate and a wholesale scale. In addition to the killing of the innocent, the objective of course was to seize public attention both here in this country and internationally.”

Asha and Abdullah are accused of leaving two cars packed with petrol, gas cylinders and nails parked in London’s West End on June 29 last year. Both failed to detonate.

Abdullah, who at the time was working as a diabetes specialist at the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley, was arrested the following day after a burning Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas canisters and petrol cans was driven into the main terminal building of Glasgow airport.

A third man, Kafeel Ahmed, believed to have been the driver of the vehicle, died from severe burns.

Asha, a Jordanian neurologist who had been employed at Addenbrookes hospital in Cambridge, was arrested on the M6 motorway later that day.

Laidlaw said: “Both men hold or adhere to extreme Islamic belief and both share - despite their professions and their obligations to save life and avert suffering - the same extreme religious and murderous ideology as has inspired other terrorists who have struck at or threatened this country in recent years.”

Both men deny charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life between January 2006 and July 2007.