LONDON, Dec 16: An Iraqi doctor was convicted on Tuesday of planning to bomb a nightclub in central London and a packed Scottish airport a day later last year in order to commit murder on an “indiscriminate and wholesale scale”.

Bilal Abdulla, 29, was part of an Islamist cell that planned a series of spectacular bombings and which then made a dramatic suicide ram-raid attack on Glasgow Airport when the original plans failed.

Abdulla, along with Kafeel Ahmed, had wanted to punish the British people for their country’s perceived persecution of Palestinian Muslims and those in Afghanistan and Iraq, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw said their plans only failed because of a mixture of good fortune and technical mistakes which meant the devices did not explode. Abdulla was found guilty of conspiracy to murder.

—Reuters