Suspects in Britain Bomb Plot Linked by Family, School, Work

Police officers who were called to check the Mercedes near the Tiger Tiger club in the early hours of June 29 noticed that the back seat was filled with propane gas cylinders. They opened the car and found it also contained roofing nails to act as shrapnel and a cellphone rigged as a detonator.

As a bomb squad worked on that car, tow truck workers were putting the hook on a blue Mercedes parked illegally nearby on Cockspur Street. They towed the car to an impound lot near Hyde Park, where attendants did not notice that it was packed with propane and nails. Not until hours later, when news of the first car bomb was all over television and radio, did attendants notice the odor of gas coming from the Mercedes in the garage.

British news reports said the bombers called the cellphones in the cars several times in an attempt to detonate the bombs. The dud bombs left police with a treasure trove of evidence, including the records of calls made and received on the phones.

At 2:45 p.m. the next day, detectives arrived at the offices of the Paisley Taxi Company in Glasgow, which had received more than a dozen phone calls for cabs from the cellphones found in London. Twenty-six minutes later, at 3:11 p.m., as company officials went through call records with police, a Jeep Cherokee filled with gas cylinders rammed the main entrance of Glasgow Airport's passenger terminal and burst into flames.

Two men emerged from the car. Witnesses said a man whom police later identified as Ahmed poured more fuel on the fire and on himself.

Bystanders and police wrestled the two to the ground. Police officer Stewart Ferguson told reporters that when he approached Ahmed, "He was well ablaze, clothing, hair, skin, and from the attitude he was in, lying on his back, there was a kind of resignation about him, as if he had resigned himself to death."

The Times of India newspaper has quoted relatives as saying that on the morning of the airport attack, Ahmed had phoned home and said, "My earlier presentation failed . . . please pray for me." He added: "The time has come now."

He is now clinging to life horrifically burned in a Glasgow hospital. Because of his condition, police have been unable to question the 27-year-old man, who studied at Queen's University in Belfast and Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge.

Two of his relatives are also in custody. His younger brother, Sabeel Ahmed, 26, a trainee doctor working in a British hospital, was arrested in Liverpool. Another relative, Mohammed Haneef, 27, a doctor working in Australia, was arrested at the Brisbane Airport as he was trying to leave for India.

Australian authorities said they have since questioned at least five foreign doctors working in Australia in connection with the investigation, and have seized computers and other equipment from four hospitals in western Australia.

The other man allegedly in the Jeep, Abdulla, wanted to martyr himself to protest the Iraq war and the harm he believed it had done to Sunni Muslims, according to a close relative interviewed in Cambridge after the attack. The relative asked not to be identified because the issue is so sensitive.

Abdulla was born in England while his father was studying medicine. He moved back to Baghdad with his family when he was 2. He earned his medical degree in Baghdad in 2004, returned to England and worked in general medicine at Royal Alexandra Hospital, where doctors said he had been warned about spending too much time reading Arabic-language Web sites while on duty.