Profiles of the suspects

Two NHS doctors abandoned their professional obligation to save life and embarked on a terrorist car-bomb campaign designed to cause death on “an indiscriminate and wholesale scale”, a court was told yesterday. The men were part of a cell that bought five vehicles to convert into mobile firebombs and carry out terrorist “spectaculars” across Britain.

Woolwich Crown Court was told that Bilal Abdulla was one of the bombers who tried to detonate devices in two Mercedes cars packed with gas canisters, petrol and hundreds of nails outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in the West End of London on June 29 last year.

When the bombs failed, and knowing that police would be on his tail, Dr Abdulla attempted a suicide attack on Glasgow airport the next day, ramming a fuel-laden 4x4 into the terminal building and then throwing down petrol bombs to set it ablaze. His accomplice, Kafeel Ahmed, 28, an engineer, was severely burned and died in hospital from his injuries.

The jury was told that it was “simply luck” that many more people did not die in the attacks.

Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, for the prosecution, said that the London bomb failed to explode only because there was not enough oxygen inside the vehicle to ignite it. In Glasgow, lives were spared because the bombers’ car became stuck in the terminal doors.

In the dock with Dr Abdulla, 29, who lived and worked in Glasgow, was Mohammed Asha, who is alleged to have been the bombers’ ideological and spiritual guide.

Dr Asha, 28, who lived near Stoke-on-Trent, was the man the bombers turned to for advice and money and the only person they visited between the failed attack in London and their suicide mission in Glasgow.

The most extraordinary element of the case was that the defendants were doctors, Mr Laidlaw said.

“Having studied at universities in their homelands they sought and obtained work in British hospitals to complete their medical training,” he said. “While here they turned their attention away from the treatment of illness to the planning of murder.” Mr Laidlaw said that jihadi propaganda found in the doctors’ possession after their arrests revealed that both adhered to “extreme Islamic beliefs”.

He added: “Both share, despite their professions and their obligations to save life and avert suffering, the same extreme religious and murderous ideology as has inspired other terrorists who have struck at or threatened this country in recent years.”

Dr Abdulla, Dr Asha and Mr Ahmed met in Cambridge when they were working or studying there during 2004-05. They came together through the Islamic Academy, a charity in the city that rented rooms to young Muslim professional men.

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