British look into last week’s failed car bombings

GLASGOW, Scotland – The fast-moving investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London has swept up at least five physicians and a medical student, officials said Tuesday, including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket.\nMany of the men had roots outside Britain, with ties to Iraq, Jordan and India, and worked together at hospitals in Scotland or England, officials said.\nNone of the plotters arrested so far is named on U.S. terror watch lists that identify potential suspects, according to a senior American counterterror official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.\nBritish Broadcasting Corp. and Sky News identified a suspect badly burned in the failed attack on Glasgow airport as Khalid Ahmed, also a doctor. Police declined to confirm the identity but have said the injured man was the driver of the Jeep that rammed the Scottish airport. He is hospitalized under armed guard.\nOne of the doctors from India, 27-year-old Muhammad Haneef, was arrested late Monday at the international airport in the Australian city of Brisbane, the Australian attorney general said.\nHaneef worked in 2005 at Halton Hospital in England, hospital spokesman Mark Shone said. A 26-year-old man arrested Saturday in Liverpool also practiced there, Shone said.\nAustralian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said Haneef was being held under counterterrorism laws that allow him to be detained without \ncharges being immediately filed.\n“The doctor was regarded by the hospital as, in many senses, a model citizen – excellent references and so on,” said Queensland Premier Peter Beattie.\nPolice in Glasgow said two more men, aged 25 and 28, were arrested Sunday in residences at Glasgow’s Royal Alexandra Hospital, where staff identified them as a junior doctor and a medical student.\nAmid increased security at British airports, train stations and on city streets, two men attempting to buy gas canisters at an industrial estate were arrested in Blackburn, Northern England, under anti-terrorism laws. Police said it was too early to determine if the men were linked to the London and Glasgow attacks.\nBritish-born terrorists behind the bloody 2005 London transit bombings and others in thwarted plots here were linked to terror training camps and foreign radicals in Pakistan.\nAuthorities said police searched at least 19 locations at a time of already high vigilance before the anniversary of the suicide bombings in London that killed 52 people on July 7, 2005.\nIn the latest attacks, two car bombs failed to explode in central London on Friday, and two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas cylinders into the entrance of Glasgow International Airport and then set it on fire Saturday.\nThe British government security official said investigators were working on one theory that the same people may have driven the explosives-laden cars into London and the blazing sport utility vehicle in Glasgow.\nBomb experts carried out a second controlled explosion on a car at the Royal Alexandra Hospital hospital Monday, after a similar blast Sunday. Police said the car was linked to the investigation, but no explosives were found.