Terrorism Threat Level In Britain Is Lowered
More Screening Set For Foreign Doctors After Bomb Incidents

By Kevin Sullivan and Karla Adam
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 5, 2007; A12

LONDON, July 4 -- 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 for visas to work in the United Kingdom.

In Baghdad, a prominent British cleric said that in April he met a man in Jordan, who turned out to be a Sunni insurgent, who told him of his plans to kill Britons and Americans and warned, "Those who cure you will kill you." Canon Andrew White 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 incidents in London and Glasgow, the Foreign Office spokesman said the report 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 that 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. The official would not specify what information about the suspects appeared in the databases, but said that it "could have included things such as a name, telephone number, e-mail address or nom de guerre."

"We are still trying to determine how did they come together, what overseas linkages there are, and whether they are significant or incidental," the official said, adding that investigators were studying the significance of the suspects' being medical professionals working in British hospitals. "Right now we don't know if their profession has played a part in this or not. What we have learned from experience is that there is no profile for the type of person who becomes a terrorist."

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 on 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. Some British media have reported that Abdulla and Ahmed were the men who parked two Mercedes sedans packed with propane and nails in a crowded London entertainment district Friday night. The bombs failed to detonate.

"Nobody thought for a minute though that he would do something like this. I am surprised he is a suspect," Kwieder said. "But he could get upset in a minute, I could see it from the reaction in his face that he could get very angry quickly."

The Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday that Abdulla was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where his father was working as a doctor, and that the family moved back to Iraq when he was a child. The newspaper quoted a classmate of Abdulla's who said he was fervent about his Islamic faith and once tried to destroy a crucifix belonging to a Christian student. "By high school he was known as a Wahhabi," the classmate said. "He was a Sunni extremist."

Abdulla graduated from Baghdad University Medical School in 2004 and was an intern starting his post-graduate studies, Akif al-Alousi, a former board member of the Iraqi Medical Association, said in a phone interview from Bahrain. He said Abdulla went to Britain about a year ago.

"It's a shock that someone so educated could turn violent and have extreme views," Kwieder said. "I don't think this started in Cambridge, but we must maintain our vigilance and try to see where this came from. If I knew he, or anyone else, had extreme views, I would not hesitate to call the authorities."

In an interview in Baghdad, White, the British cleric, recalled that he spent 40 minutes in his hotel suite in Amman, Jordan, listening to the coldblooded threats of a man he met at a conference of religious leaders on April 18. He said the man in his 40s wore Western clothes and was apparently well-educated.

"He talked to me about terrible things, about how he wanted to kill British and American people," White recalled. At the end of the conversation, before White cut him off because he could not stand listening to the threats, the man made the comment about "those who cure you."

White said that after the meeting, the man's words lingered in his head. He said he wrote later: "I have met with the devil today."

White said he could not release the man's name but that he was an Iraqi living in Syria. White said he could not be sure that the man's comments were related to the attempted car-bomb attacks in Britain, but he instantly remembered them when he heard about the incidents.

"The thing is, like everything here, you can never be certain," he said.

Adam reported from Cambridge, England. Correspondent Joshua Partlow in Baghdad contributed to this report.