Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla was born into a wealthy and respected medical family in Iraq. He was educated at Baghdad’s top schools and lived in the prestigious Mansur neighbourhood.

His parents had hoped he would follow in their footsteps by furthering their medical studies abroad and then bringing his expertise back to his homeland.

However, the Sunni Muslim was turning to extremist Islamic views while studying medicine at the University of Baghdad. Inspired by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, he joined Sunni militia fighting rival Shia groups and coalition forces in Iraq.

Abdulla said fighting with insurgents represented “the best and most rewarding days of my life”, in one document discovered after his arrest.

But senior militia members in Iraq decided Abdulla should use his British passport to travel to the country whose troops had overthrown Saddam. Shortly after his graduation in 2004, he was sent to Cambridge, where he still has relatives.

It was in the university town that he first began to plot secretly to bring car bombing tactics - seen almost everyday in downtown Baghdad - to Britain.

Living in a cramped flat above a curry house, he recruited Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian engineering PhD student, after the two men became close friends while working in the city.

Even in Cambridge, among liberal educational circles, Abdulla made little effort to conceal his extremist views. He bullied other members of a university email discussion group about how Shias were a “growing cancer”. He also rounded on his guitar-playing flat mate, ordering him to “stop playing and start praying” before showing him a video of a Shia being beheaded in Iraq.

He then moved to Glasgow to work as a junior house officer in general surgery at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

Counter terrorism police said Abdulla was the strategic director of the plot, choosing targets, identifying tactics and obtaining funding. Ahmed used his skills to research, design and build the complex mobile phone detonators and car bombs.

Abdulla calmly admitted to the jury at Woolwich Crown Court that he was a terrorist, but used an extraordinary defence that he simply wanted to shock Britons.

His devotion to al Qaeda was clear when his will - which he spent eight hours writing, according to records on the laptop on which it was discovered - was read to court. Addressed to Osama bin Laden, Abdulla made clear he wanted to kill British and American soldiers and said he was willing to target women and children.

In the document, he declared his thirst to “lick the blood” of Westerners and attack the “Kingdom of Evil”. He wrote that a population “busy with alcoholic drinking and with their intimate friends” could only be awoken “by the sound of booby trapped vehicles”.

But when the West End bombs failed, he left police a trail of evidence that led directly to him.

After fleeing to Glasgow, he tied a red and white headscarf around his head for the final suicide attack on Glasgow Airport. Witnesses described how he tried to hold people back “like a goalkeeper”, shouting Allahu Akbar (God is great), as he waited for the burning vehicle to explode behind him.

Like his other devices, it failed to detonate. Abdulla was told to step away from the vehicle but tried to run, lashing out at police and civilians who tried to grapple him to the ground.

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