London – With eight suspects in last weekend’s attempted car-bomb attacks in custody, all of them foreign doctors or other medical professionals, Britain reduced its terrorism-threat level from critical to severe Wednesday, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced more rigorous background checks on foreign doctors applying to work in the United Kingdom.
In Baghdad, Iraq, a prominent British cleric said a man he met in April, who turned out to be a Sunni insurgent, told him of his plans to kill Britons and Americans and warned, “Those who cure you will kill you.”
Canon Andrew White, who said the man seemed like “the devil,” said he reported the meeting to British Foreign Office officials.
A Foreign Office spokesman said Wednesday that White did not mention the specific sentence about “those who cure you” but simply reported a “general tirade” against the West that “didn’t merit further analysis.”
In light of the medical aspects of the attacks on London and Glasgow, Scotland, the Foreign Office spokesman said the incident has been passed along to Scotland Yard, where detectives are working to determine whether the suspects, including two Iraqi doctors, plotted the attack by themselves or with assistance from al-Qaeda or other international extremists.
A British security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said information related to “some, but not all” of the suspects appears in British security databases kept on suspected terrorists. The official said none of the suspects had been the subject of a previous investigation, and none had been seen in surveillance of other suspected extremists.
Security remained extraordinarily tight across Britain on Wednesday, with a noticeably beefed-up police presence in public places and frequent delays on trains and buses as members of the public reported numerous suspicious packages, none of which turned out to be dangerous.
In Glasgow, where two men now in custody rammed a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the airport’s main terminal Saturday, someone rammed a car into a shop owned by a Pakistani man and set it alight Tuesday in what appeared to be a revenge attack against Muslims.
Speaking at his first Prime Minister’s Questions – the premier’s weekly appearance in the House of Commons – since taking office one week ago, Brown announced several new anti-terrorism security measures, including expanded background checks and an immediate review of the recruitment process for foreigners coming to work in the National Health Service.
Announcing the reduced terrorism-threat level, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said there was “no intelligence to suggest that an attack is expected imminently” but that “there remains a serious and real threat against the United Kingdom.”
In Cambridge, a mosque official remembered one of the suspects, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, as a man who could “get angry very quickly” and was upset at the situation in Iraq and what he perceived as the plight of Sunni Muslims.
Hicham Kwieder, secretary of the Cambridge Muslim Welfare Society mosque, said Abdulla, one of two men in the flaming Jeep at Glasgow Airport, used to rent a house from the mosque before the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was a regular worshiper at Friday prayers. Kwieder said he last saw Abdulla about a year ago.
“He said the situation in Iraq was affecting him and the situation there was getting worse,” Kwieder said in an interview. “He said the Sunnis were not looked after the way they should be, that they suffered a lot.”
The driver of the Jeep has been identified as another Iraqi doctor, Khalil Ahmed. He is under heavy guard at Royal Alexandra Hospital, where he and Abdulla worked, with burns that doctors described as severe and life-threatening.
