KEY POINTS:
One was a poetry-loving trainee brain surgeon. Another was a talented engineer developing 3-D maps for the blind.
The other was the son of an eminent Iraqi rheumatologist who had followed his father in taking the Hippocratic oath by declaring, "Above all, I must not play at God."
Shortly before 1am local time on Friday, June 29 last year, that is precisely what Kafeel Ahmed and Bilal Abdulla did, when, in a series of frantic phone calls, they tried to remotely detonate two huge car bombs outside a nightclub in London's West End packed with midsummer revellers.
Yesterday, a jury found Abdulla, a 29-year-old British Iraqi, dedicated to healing and working as a National Health Service (NHS) hospital doctor, guilty of conspiracy to cause "wholesale and indiscriminate murder" with a nationwide bombing campaign that ended in a suicide assault on Glasgow Airport in a flaming Jeep packed with gas canisters. He was to be sentenced overnight.
After a three-month trial at Woolwich Crown Court, jurors cleared a second NHS doctor, trainee neurologist Mohammed Asha, 28, of any involvement in the plot executed by Abdulla and Ahmed, an Indian-born PhD student who suffered fatal burns in the attempt to kill hundreds of holidaymakers at Glasgow Airport. Before succumbing to his injuries, the 28-year-old engineer was treated for five weeks in the hospital where Glasgow-based Abdulla had been working.
After the verdicts were delivered, Asha, a poetry-loving trainee brain surgeon and father of one from Jordan, shook hands and embraced Abdulla, the former friend he had accused in the witness box of betraying him and destroying his life. Asha, now at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, is fighting a bid to deport him to Jordan over a claimed visa irregularity.
Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said she was "pleased" with the guilty verdict against Abdulla, whose defence that he had meant the cars to be merely flaming protests against the war in Iraq was dismissed by the jury. She said: "This conviction underlines again the serious and sustained threat we face in the UK from terrorism."
Scotland Yard underlined that it was only by good fortune and technical errors made by Ahmed, himself the son of doctors, that the attack on the Tiger Tiger nightclub near Piccadilly Circus failed. Mobile phone detonators failed to ignite the lethal mixture of gas, petrol and nails placed in the two Mercedes cars used for the assault.
The two men made their getaway from Tiger Tiger on tourist rickshaws before making 15 calls to rigged mobile phones designed to detonate the car bombs, which ultimately failed to explode. Abdulla and Ahmed returned to Glasgow after a brief meeting with Asha outside his hospital in Stoke.
Some 24 hours later, with counterterrorist police in hot pursuit using signals from the mobile phones used in the nightclub attack, Abdulla and Ahmed launched their assault on Glasgow Airport.
There was a stark contrast between the terrorist campaign that began outside the Tiger Tiger nightspot and the previous assaults on London. The 7/7 bombers - who attacked the London Underground on July 7, 2005, killing over 50 people - came from modest backgrounds characterised by social exclusion while the failed 21/7 attackers - would-be suicide bombers who acted on July 21, 2005 - were child refugees who had struggled to find purpose. But the trio responsible for the Tiger Tiger and Glasgow attacks were highly educated, middle-class graduates and trained healers.
When the smoke cleared from the smouldering international terminal at Glasgow after Abdulla and Ahmed had driven a blazing Jeep into the building on its busiest day of the year, terrorism in Britain was dramatically changed.
No longer was it the preserve of disfranchised, disadvantaged young men. One senior counterterrorism source involved in the hunt for the cell said: "I suppose I am not shocked by much any more. But the whole idea of people who take the Hippocratic oath then setting out to wantonly destroy human life, I find that very shocking."
In many ways, it was the ultimate disguise. Abdulla, 29, and Ahmed, 28, who died from burns sustained in the airport attack, were "clean skins" completely unknown to security services.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner John McDowall, head of the Yard's counterterrorism command, said: "These individuals were not on our radar.
"This was a group that was largely self-motivated, came up with the ideas themselves, tutored themselves through the internet."
The events had their roots in the august surroundings of Cambridge, where the plotters arrived in 2004 and 2005 in pursuit of academic excellence.
Abdulla, who had achieved some of the highest exam scores in his native Iraq, was studying to convert his MD qualification from Baghdad to practise in Britain, while Ahmed was studying at Anglia Ruskin University for a PhD entitled "Computational Approach to Ink Jet Printing of Tactile Maps", a project to produce 3-D map guides for the blind or partially sighted.
But beneath the men's run-of-the-mill student existence - Abdulla worked at a Staples stationery store to make ends meet - the first inkling of radicalism came as the three debated the issues of the day, often with unguarded ferocity, in the presence of members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a fundamentalist Muslim group at the Islamic Academy, a Muslim cultural centre in an anonymous semi-detached house where Ahmed had taken a room.
Abdulla, who was born in Britain, in particular was possessed of a seething anger directed at minority Shiite Muslims in Iraq as well as America and Britain for their "support" of Shiite violence in the wake of the 2003 invasion.
Asha was also in Cambridge for a hospital research placement early in 2005. In his evidence, Asha insisted he had spent his time trying to steer Abdulla away from radicalism.
Prosecutors insisted the intention of the bombings was disturbingly clear-cut. Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, said: " It was to be murder on a terrible scale for the British public, both in London and Glasgow. It was to be punishment more generally for all of us in this country because of events in Iraq."
Abdulla returned to Baghdad in 2006 to visit his family, who were struggling to cope in the aftermath of the American-led invasion.
The Independent understands Abdulla joined Sunni gunmen fighting coalition troops and was chosen as the leader for a direct strike against Britain using his status as a doctor and his British passport.
It was time for the cell to be activated. While working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, near Glasgow, Abdulla began the preparations for the assembly of the car bombs in a blacked-out garage. The court was told enough detonators were made for at least two more attacks after the West End bombings.
Material found on a laptop computer used by Ahmed revealed he had researched a series of public events, including music festivals, in June and July 2007 which detectives believe may have been a list of potential targets.
In a script written on his laptop in apparent preparation for a martyrdom video, Abdulla wrote: "Do not blame us, but blame the shameless people who comprehend nothing in life apart from what relates to sex and alcoholic drinks.
"The truth is that these people do not care about what is happening in our land as they are all busy with alcoholic drinking and with their intimate friends. These people can only be awaken [sic] by the sound of booby traps and the mujahideen hailing 'God is great'."
- INDEPENDENT
