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LONDON - It was an alleged international terrorist sleeper cell, drawn from the world of professional medicine, maintaining perfect security cover.
And it came within a successful mobile phone call of carrying out the devastating 'spectacular' al Qaeda have been threatening.
Experts in policing and security circles say they have never come across anything like it before.
Yesterday, as arrests continued, in Britain and Australia, and more suspect cars were blown up, intelligence specialists were expressing their amazement at the sheer audacity and ambition of the alleged plot.
The suspects form a disparate group of people of different nationality.
Medicine and the Muslim faith are the only common factors between them.
If the emerging hypothesis in the security community is correct, they were sent to the UK to blend into the community, and wait for the right time to attack.
The group were in a profession respected and dedicated to saving rather than taking lives; they were sent to a country whose health service is in dire need of help from medical staff from abroad; they settled in areas outside London well away from what are considered radical Muslim hotspots.
They studiously avoided places like extremist mosques and Islamist bookshops.
As a result of all these precautions, scrupulously observed, the cell remained below the radar of the police and the security service during one of the most intense anti-terrorist offensives in British history.
But why did a plot with so much focus and foresight fail in its execution? The answer, according to security sources, is that the very secrecy which protected the cell from scrutiny also prevented it from being helped in the planning and bomb making by an outside expert.
There is, say the sources, no credible evidence so far that any 'master bomber' was in contact prior to the attacks.
This was because of fears, perhaps, that such a person could be tracked and thus compromise the safety of the cell.
Instead the members of the group operated with complete autonomy and were allowed to carry out their own mission.
The devices placed in the two Mercedes cars in central London and the Jeep in Glasgow --- propane gas cylinders, petrol and nails designed to be detonated by mobile telephones --- are likely to have been chosen from the internet or existing literature.
These devices, according to security analysts, would not have been an experienced terrorist's first weapon of choice.
Much has been made of the 'Iraq connection' in the London and Glasgow incidents.
The two would be London bombers, we now know, were Iraqi doctors living in Glasgow, and car bombs have become synonymous with Baghdad.
But, crucially, car bombers in Iraq would use explosives with much more immediate and lethal effect to carry out their blasts.
Investigators also discount suggestions that the cell had been instructed from inside prison by Dhiren Barot, who was convicted for plotting car bombings in the so called 'Gas Limos Project' in November last year.
Barot pleaded guilty at his trial although the 'Project' never went into action.
His defence team maintained in mitigation that his plans could and would not have worked.
That did not save Barot from a 30-year sentence, But explosives experts say that it is, indeed, the case that such a plan would be unreliable as the means of a bombing campaign.
The gas method involved opening the cylinder tops and letting the vehicles fill up with vapours which would then be ignited by mobiles phone calls.
That, in turn, would explode the gas cylinders creating a fireball spraying petrol and nails.
If all that worked then the effect would have been hugely destructive.
The bombers, however, made four calls to the mobile in the Mercedes parked outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub and two to the one in Cockspur Street without managing to detonate the gas and petrol device.
In fact, the gas vapour in the car outside the Tiger Tiger car became so noticeable that it led to the police being called and the discovery of the bomb.
Furthermore, the wealth of evidence left in the two intact Mercedes saloons, especially the mobile telephones, led to the sweeping series of raids and arrests across the country.
After meticulously planning for so long, the cell had chosen one of the crudest and riskiest means of conducting a terrorist attack.
Robert Emerson, a security analyst who had worked in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said: "What was being planned, we better say allegedly, with the use of doctors was reprehensible.
"But it was also very impressive until right at the end when they simply used a pretty unreliable method. But other terrorists who follow, unfortunately, will learn from these mistakes."
- INDEPENDENT
