An Indian doctor was detained in Australia for questioning in connection with a suspected al-Qaeda plot to detonate car bombs in London and Scotland as he tried to leave the country, officials said on Tuesday.
The detention of the hospital registrar at Brisbane airport widened the international dimension of the investigation and took to eight the number held, at least three of whom are doctors.
All eight are linked to a plan to detonate two car bombs left in central London early on Friday and an attack on Glasgow city airport in Scotland on Saturday using a fuel-laden Jeep Cherokee.
In another development, the BBC said that police had carried out two controlled explosions on a car at a mosque in Glasgow early on Tuesday. No other details were immediately available.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard told reporters that the 27-year-old Indian national seized in Brisbane had not been arrested and no charges had been made against him.
Queensland state Premier Peter Beattie said earlier that the man, who was in Australian on a temporary visa for working professionals, had ”some connections to the incidents in the UK”.
The Gold Coast Hospital registrar had been recruited from Liverpool, England, in 2006 through an advertisement in the British Medical Journal.
One of the seven held in Britain was detained in Liverpool.
”Hospital staff described him as a model citizen in many ways,” Beattie said, adding that another employee of the hospital was being questioned, although he had not been linked to the plot.
Australia, a close ally of the United States and Britain, has never suffered a major peacetime attack on home soil.
The police raid came hours after a state-backed researcher said up to 3 000 Muslim youths in Australia were in ”ideological sleeper cells” and had been targeted by radical Islamic teachers.
Middle East doctors
Of the other doctors held over the plot, British police sources named one as Bilal Abdulla, who qualified in Iraq in 2004, and another as Mohammed Asha, who qualified in Jordan the same year. Asha’s wife was also arrested.
According to the Muslim News, a website that follows the British Muslim community, another of those seized in Britain was also a doctor. It quoted a colleague of the man as saying he had come to Britain from Bangalore in India.
Britain has seen a marked increase in terrorism-related attacks since the September 11 strikes on the United States and its decision to join US forces in invading Iraq in 2003.
But previous attacks, including one on London’s transport system in July 2005 which killed 52 people, have tended to involve radicalised, British-born Muslims, not educated attackers from overseas, security experts say.
Fireball
British police cordoned off a hospital in Paisley, a town just outside Glasgow, on Monday and carried out several controlled detonations.
The hospital, the Royal Alexandra, is where Abdulla worked, staff said, and where he is also believed to be undergoing treatment for severe burns after taking part in the attack on Glasgow airport, when his vehicle was turned into a fireball.
Fearing further attacks, police banned cars and other vehicles from directly approaching airports, and security measures were stepped up across the country. Authorities kept the threat level at ”critical”, the highest rating.
The series of foiled and actual attacks poses a stern test for Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Scot who replaced Tony Blair only last week and who has come under pressure from some quarters to change policy on Iraq and withdraw British troops.
Blair was known for an aggressive stance on security and a foreign policy that strongly supported the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. The bombers who struck London in 2005 said in videos they were punishing Britain for Blair’s policies.
In Amman, Jordan, the father of Mohammed Asha described his son as a good Muslim, not a fanatic, and expressed incredulity that he could be involved in an al-Qaeda-style bomb plot.
”I am sure Mohammed does not have any links of this nature because his history in Jordan and since he was a kid does not include any kind of activity of this nature,” he said. – Reuters