Two men attempt to commit suicide and mass murder by driving a jeep packed with gas cylinders and petrol into an airport terminal. One is suspected to be a doctor, a man supposed to be committed to saving, not taking, lives. The other, now fighting for his life in a burns unit, is a “pleasant, calm and sociable” aeronautical engineer.

Fast forward a week. By now, a further three doctors and two trainee doctors are under arrest in Britain and Australia on suspicion of involvement in the botched car bomb attacks on London and Glasgow.

For the many people – including colleagues and patients – who had personal contact with one or more of these medical professionals, the suggestion that they may be terrorists will have come as a profound shock. Some may owe their lives to them.

To this sense of disbelief can be added the horrified astonishment felt worldwide at the very suggestion that a group of physicians may have been involved in a plot to commit mass murder.

‘Items sent as earthquake aid’

Hidden among clothing were goods selected and purchased to support the activities of terrorists, a court was told

Multimedia

• Pictures: Glasgow airport attack

BACKGROUND

• Brown plans to double 28-day detention limit

• Men in bungled raid say police attacked again

• More than Vigilance

• 'Dirty bomb' mastermind plotted wave of atrocities across Britain

• Jihadi house parties of hate

Bewilderment stems not merely from the knowledge that there can be no more fundamental way to break the Hippocratic Oath, in which a doctor vows not to act “with direct intent deliberately to end a human life”. Doctors – dedicated, intelligent, well-educated, relatively affluent – do not fit the profile of the maniacal jihadist terrorist that is lodged in our collective imagination.

If someone hates us so much that he is prepared to sacrifice his own life in order to commit mass murder, then we want to find a rational explanation in his personality or his background to separate him from the rest of us.

He would ideally have grown up in deprivation, with a dysfunctional family, few friends, minimal education, a poverty of expectation and a world view that can be easily moulded by the Islamist zealots whose nihilistic creed offers a simple, deadly solution to all of life’s problems.

The reality, disturbingly, is very different. A study of 172 al-Qaeda terrorists conducted four years ago by Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer in Pakistan, found that 90 per cent came from a relatively stable, secure background.

Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists. The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26, and three quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children. Only one in a hundred had shown any form of psychotic disorder. Two thirds became drawn towards a terror group while living in a country that was not their homeland.

Dr Sageman’s findings, published in 2004 in Understanding Terrorist Networks, led him to conclude that “most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile”. He wrote: “Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They spoke three, four, five, six languages.”

Unlike the lone serial killer, these men functioned well in groups. Indeed they depended, isolated as they were in a foreign country, on a close circle of friends who reinforced and legitimised their beliefs. “You could almost say that those least likely to cause harm individually are most likely to do so collectively,” Dr Sageman wrote. Yesterday he told The Times that the existence of a terror plot involving foreign doctors should surprise no one.

“When you look at the global Salafi jihad, you have three waves. The first were the companions of bin Laden, the characters in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” he said. “The second, on whom my 2003 research was based, were the best and the brightest from the Middle East. Those are the guys who became radicalised in the West. Many of them are engineers and physicians.

“And the third are what people call the home-grown, these are the guys who are second or third generation in the West, and they are less well-educated. Their average age is about 19 or 20, and there are more criminal elements there.”

Before the attack on London in 2005, Britain expected Islamist terrorists to be foreigners. Since 7/7, the focus has been on British-born extremists, but the second wave, as Dr Sageman describes them, have never ceased to be a threat.

“Just because, right now, we’ve got so many home-grown terrorists, that doesn’t mean that what attracted the second wave to this violent ideology is dead.” Ask Dr Sageman to name two likely professions for a second-wave terrorist and he selects “engineers and physicians”.

“What makes people like engineers or physicians try to work for the good of the whole society is also the very same impulse which makes people sacrifice their lives for the sake of a community, albeit [in this case] an imaginary community like the ummah [the global community of Muslims].

“You would expect those people to be more active [in terrorism]. “Engineers and physicians are far more active in their everyday lives, trying to do things. They’re far more action-oriented than, say, lawyers. You don’t find many lawyers, but you find a lot of engineers and physicians.” Step forward Osama bin Laden, graduate in civil engineering, or his number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a brilliant Egyptian surgeon, or Mohamed Atta, the architectural engineering graduate who piloted the American Airlines flight that destroyed the north tower of New York’s World Trade Centre.

Dr Sageman’s second wave – for example, the 9/11 hijackers – and the third wave of home-grown terrorists as represented by the boys from Beeston, may seem to have little in common except an impulse to commit mass slaughter in the name of Allah.

Both groups, however, typically experience a sense of dislocation from the society in which they live and work. Clive Walker, a terrorism specialist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Leeds University, says that Mohammad Sidique Khan and his three companions shared a form of “social anomie”.

“It’s a kind of in-between state, a symptom of rejection in many ways. They feel rejected, but equally they reject the available cultures, both of their fathers and of the society they find themselves in,” he said.

“So they’re looking for some kind of explanation or some kind of cultural philosophy which makes them feel important and valued in ways which they don’t find from the other two, obvious sources of cultural expression.”

A similar absence of connection, he says, is often felt by Middle Eastern professionals working in the West, “receptive young men who’ve left the rather more conservative background and culture of their parents, have been exposed to something else and find that equally strange and unpalatable”.

Those searching for an identity that is neither Western, nor the passive Islam of their parents, are presented with a seductive call to duty, and a ready-made sense of belonging, by those espousing the Manichean tenets of radical Islam.

Here is a black and white world of good, the global ummah, and evil, in the form of everyone and everything nonMuslim. Because the West is seen as engaged in a global war against Islam, jihad in the name of Allah is seen as the duty of every Muslim.

That jihadist terrorism is abhorrent to the vast majority of Muslims, and Muslim doctors, living in Britain was emphasised yesterday when a coalition of groups calling itself Muslims United took out advertisements in national newspapers to condemn the car bomb attacks.

“Not in our name,” they said, quoting a verse from the Koran: “Whoever kills an innocent soul, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind. And whoever saves one, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind.” Your educated, middle-class jihadist will point out that the full verse actually prohibits the killing of another human being “except as a punishment for murder and other villainy in the land”.

The Koran’s fifth chapter continues: “Those that make war against God and his apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain . . .” For some Muslims, especially those who have lived in or near Iraq, it does not demand a great leap of faith, whatever their profession, to include the United States and Britain among those “that make war against God”.

And so a few dislocated individuals meet, bond and grow to share a belief system in which they are the chosen for whom Allah has reserved a place in paradise.

Martyrdom is heady stuff.

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