The double bed was made up in Mohammed Haneef’s top-floor rented flat on the Gold Coast, but Australian police officers who raided it at 7.50am yesterday found unwashed dishes in the sink, washing hanging on the balcony and the laptop gone.

The young Indian doctor had told colleagues at the Gold Coast Hospital on Monday that he was anxious to return to India to join his wife and child. Dr Haneef, 27, was clearly in a hurry to leave Australia, but he never succeeded.

Late on Monday night the Australian police, acting on a tip from their British counterparts, arrested him at Brisbane international airport as he was waiting to board a Malaysian Airlines jet on a one-way ticket to India via Kuala Lumpur. He was led away with a minimum of fuss.

Dr Haneef’s friend and colleague at the Gold Coast Hospital, Mohammed Asif Ali, was also taken in for questioning though he has not yet been arrested. Dr Ali, another Indian Muslim, lived barely 400 yards from Dr Haneef, and both had worked for the National Health Service in Liverpool.

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Dr Haneef’s Honda car was found outside Dr Ali’s apartment block. Sources at the hospital said that both men were “model doctors” with good references, good records and no obvious ideological bent.

Mick Keelty, the Australian Federal Police Commissioner, said last night that Dr Haneef was cooperating with police.

What links these two men with the six suspects in the London and Glasgow bomb plots who are now being held at Paddington Green police station on the far side of the world?

All are young, all are Muslims, and all are members of the medical profession who qualified at about the same time. But they come from Jordan, Iraq, India and – possibly – Saudi Arabia.

Confident that they have rounded up all the main suspects, the police are now striving to work out how they met, how they communicated, what their motivation was and whether they were radicalised here or before they arrived in Britain.

Were they recruited by al-Qaeda? Were they recruited individually in their home countries and then put in touch with each other? Did they meet in Britain – at a hospital, on a training course, or at the English language tests they were obliged to take before working here – and hatch the bomb plots among themselves?

Were they all part of the conspiracy, or have some been implicated because the British police found their numbers on the two mobile telephones recovered from the Mercedes cars used in the failed London bombings?

The first clue came yesterday when senior intelligence sources told The Timesthat Bilal Abdulla, the Iraqi doctor named as one of the two suspects in Saturday’s Jeep attack on Glasgow airport, was a friend of Mohammed Asha, the Jordanian doctor from Newcastle-under-Lyme who was working at a hospital in Stoke-on-Trent and was picked up on the M6 motorway on Saturday evening. Dr Asha’s wife, Marwa, 27, who is a hospital laboratory researcher, was arrested at the same time.

Dr Abdulla and Dr Asha were introduced by their fathers, who were old friends, and apparently kept in touch when they came to Britain. The sources claim that Dr Abdulla was a member of a radical Islamist group that was plotting a terrorist act. Whether he involved Dr Asha in that alleged plot, or told him of it, is unclear.

A taxi driver told yesterday how he took Dr Abdulla to the airport two-and-a-half weeks before the attack, in what may have been a “dry run”, and said he always insisted on sitting in the front of the car.

Dr Abdulla worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, near Glasgow. Khalid Ahmed, believed to be the driver of the Jeep, who is critically ill in the Royal Alexandra’s intensive care unit, is also thought to have worked at the hospital. So are the two suspects, aged 28 and 25, picked up in an accommodation block for doctors at the Royal Alexandra on Sunday night. They are thought to be Middle Eastern, possibly Saudi, though there is no confirmation of that.

The link between Dr Haneef and Dr Ali, the two doctors working in Australia, is obvious. They knew each other when they worked in Liverpool, and may even have shared a flat there.

Dr Haneef, who comes from Karnataka state and studied medicine in Bangalore as part of an affirmative action programme for Muslims and lower castes, graduated in 2002 and later worked as a locum near Liverpool. He answered an advertisement for doctors that the Australian state of Queensland placed in the British Medical Journal in March 2006 and registered to work in the Gold Coast Hospital oncology unit last September. Dr Haneef lived on the top floor of the Telesto apartment block in Southport, mostly occupied by hospital workers and students.

Steve Bosher, the building manager, said that the doctor signed a six-month lease three months ago. “The curtains were always open, they weren’t hiding anything. They kept one bedroom for praying by the looks of it. There was a prayer sheet on the wall.” He said that police took a lot of papers and a computer.

Dr Ali, who trained at Mysore University and qualified in 2001, also worked as a doctor in Liverpool and may have answered the same advertisement. He registered to work with the Queensland medical board last October, one month after Dr Haneef, and was employed in the Gold Coast Hospital emergency department.

The two Indian doctors could easily have known another of the suspects who was arrested near Lime Street station in Liverpool last Sunday. The 26-year-old, an Indian named last night as Sabeel Ahmed, was working as a doctor at both the Halton and Warrington hospitals.

What links the Liverpool “cell” of Indian doctors – if that is what it is – to the alleged conspirators of Middle Eastern origin from Glasgow and Newcastle-under-Lyme is not yet known.

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