Osama approved Brit bombings

Times:

The London and Glasgow bomb plots were carried out with the approval of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, a top foreign intelligence source said last night.

“It was an established fact from Day 1 that al-Qaeda was behind this and it was planned by its followers in Great Britain with bin Laden’s blessing,” the source told The Times.

British security officials were more guarded, saying that it was too early to say whether the plot was masterminded by some foreign hand or hatched in Britain.

The warning an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq delivered to Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working in Baghdad, in April certainly suggested that he knew of the doctors’ plot. “Those who cure you will kill you,” the man said.

The Times also learnt yesterday that Bilal Abdulla, 27, the Iraqi doctor who allegedly helped to drive a Jeep into the front of Glasgow airport last Saturday, disappeared for a year during his medical training in Baghdad. He is thought to have visited Pakistan or Lebanon.

A friend who attended the Medical College of Baghdad University with Dr Abdulla told The Times that he was a religious fanatic, and that in 2001 or 2002 he mysteriously abandoned his studies for a year.

“There was some talk that he went outside Iraq to develop his religious culture. I heard that he went to Lebanon or Pakistan,” the friend said.

On his return Dr Abdulla adopted a much more intense demeanour and isolated himself from his former friends. “He became more radical, but not to the degree that he took part in actual actions or clashes. He kept silent and became more isolated. He prayed and he kept himself away from the rest of the group.”

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After he graduated in 2004 he went overseas — the friend did not know where — and finally turned up in Scotland, where he worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

Dr Abdulla appears to have met some of the extremists during several periods he spent living in Cambridge. Police are presently searching several properties in the city.

One of those suspects is Khalid or Kafeel Ahmed, the man with whom Dr Abdulla drove a jeep into Glasgow airport. Mr Ahmed is thought to be another key figure, but he remains critically ill in the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley and his true role and identity remain unclear.

He was originally believed to be a doctor working at that hospital and the brother of Sabeel Ahmed, 26, the Indian doctor arrested in Liverpool last Saturday.

The Australian Medical Association said yesterday that a Khalid Ahmed applied numerous times, using slightly different names, to work as a doctor for the Western Australia Department of Health between February 2005 and January 2006. He was repeatedly rejected because his professional qualifications and character references were inadequate.

“It was quickly picked up in the process that he was the same bloke,” a spokesman said.

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The story contains some intriguing clues to how the Iraqi doctor decided to really blow his career in a terrorist operation. The Guardian says authorities are looking at an al Qaeda in Iraq connection as well as this:

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... A quarterly intelligence report prepared in April by the Joint Intelligence Analysis Centre (Jtac) warned while there was "no indication" of a specific threat to Britain, "we are aware that AQ-I (al-Qaida in Iraq) networks are active in the UK."

It continued: "Recent reporting has described AQ-I's Kurdish network in Iran planning what we believe may be a large-scale attack against a western target. A member of this network is reportedly involved in an operation which he believes requires AQ [al-Qaida] Core authorisation. He claims the operation will be on 'a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki' and will 'shake the Roman throne'. We assess that this operation is most likely to be a large scale, mass casualty attack against the west."

Jtac also highlighted the determination of Abd al-Hadi, the man accused by US authorities of being Osama bin Laden's emissary to al-Qaida in Iraq, to launch a terrorist attack in the UK....

Recall that one of the initial reports in the NY Times suggest that one of the arrested docs was an Iranian Kurd. He turned out to be Palestinian by birth who lived in Saudi Arabia and later went to medical school in Jordon. You would think that Iranian Kurds would have bigger fish to fry closer to home, which makes their connection with al Qaeda all the more interesting. Ansar al Islam was an al Qaeda affiliate that was located in the Kurdish area of Iraq with Saddam's apparent consent and many of its members fled into Iran when the base was over run by US and Kurdish forces in the early days of Iraqi liberation.