UK investigating plot suspects
(AP)Updated: 2007-07-04 15:39
LONDON - Investigators worked Wednesday to untangle the ties between the eight suspects arrested in connection to the failed car bombing attacks in Britain and were hunting down others believed involved on the periphery of the plot.
 An Armed police officers stands guard outside Scotland Yard, central London Tuesday, July 3, 2007. [AP]  |
All employees of the United Kingdom's National Health Service, some worked together as colleagues at hospitals in England and Scotland, and experts and officials say the evidence points to the plot being hatched after they met in Britain, rather than overseas.
"To think that these guys were a sleeper cell and somehow were able to plan this operation from the different places they were, and then orchestrate being hired by the NHS so they could get to the UK, then get jobs in the same area - I think that's a planning impossibility," said Bob Ayres, a former US intelligence officer now at London's Chatham House think tank.
"A much more likely scenario is they were here together, they discovered that they shared some common ideology, and then they decided to act on this while here in the UK," he said.
No one has been charged in the plot in which two car bombs failed to explode in central London early Friday and two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas cylinders into the entrance of Glasgow International Airport and set it on fire the following day.
The family of one suspect - Muhammad Haneef, a 27-year-old doctor from India arrested late Monday in Brisbane, Australia - professed his innocence.
"He has been detained unnecessarily. He is innocent," Qurat-ul-ain, Haneef's mother, told The Associated Press in the southern Indian city of Bangalore.
Officials in Australia, where Haneef worked at a hospital, have noted publicly that he had a one-way ticket when he was arrested at the airport.
Sumaiya, Haneef's sister, said Wednesday that he was coming to Bangalore from Australia to see his daughter who was born a week ago. Sumaiya uses one name.
"He called us before leaving (Australia). We came to know about his detention through media," Sumaiya said. "He is a responsible citizen of the country and the Indian government should help us get him back. His aim has been to be a good doctor."
Investigators believe the main plotters have been rounded up, though others involved on the periphery, including at least one British-born suspect, were still being hunted, a British government security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the details.
British-born Muslims behind the bloody 2005 London transit bombings and others in thwarted plots here have been linked to terror training camps and foreign radicals in Pakistan, and the official said Pakistan, India and several other nations were asked to check possible links with the suspects in the latest attacks.
The educational achievements of the suspects in the car bomb attempts is in sharp contrast to the men that carried out the deadly July 7 transit bombings two years ago. The ringleader of that attack, Mohammed Siddique Khan, had a degree in business studies, but with low marks, and his three fellow suicide bombers had little or no higher education.
In the current case, Haneef worked in 2005 at Halton Hospital near Liverpool in northern England, hospital spokesman Mark Shone said.
Another Indian doctor, aged 26, arrested late Saturday in Liverpool, worked at the same hospital, Shone confirmed, but refused to divulge his name.
A third suspect, Mohammed Jamil Asha, a 26-year-old doctor from Jordan of
Palestinian heritage, was arrested Saturday with his wife, Marwa Asha, 27, who
was identified in British media reports as a medical assistant. He worked at
North Staffordshire Hospital, near the Midlands town of Newcastle-under-Lyme.
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