Update on the Doctors’ Jihad Plot. By Ben McConville for Associated Press (thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist):
GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) – British police focused Tuesday on at least four physicians with roots outside Britain””including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket””in the investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London….
At least four of the eight suspects directly tied to the terror investigation were identified as doctors from Iraq, Jordan and India. One of the doctors from India, 27-year-old Muhammad Haneef, was arrested at Brisbane’s international airport where he was trying to board a flight, the Australian attorney general said….
Meanwhile, the PC types grasp for a backlash, suggesting that arson next door to a mosque must be “Islamophobia”:
Police were also investigating an attack on an Asian news agent early Tuesday in Glasgow, in which a car was rammed into the shop and caught fire or set ablaze, and the torching of a real estate office next to a mosque near Edinburgh on Monday.
Police have yet to establish if either attack was racially motivated, but Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said tension was increasing.
“It suggests there is a rising feeling of hostility where people feel comfortable in the company of others acting in a grotesque fashion,” he said….
Saeed was silent about the toleration within mosques of people acting on jihadist principles that they don’t wish to act upon themselves, but have no way to object to.
Authorities identified Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi doctor who worked at the Glasgow hospital, as the other man arrested at the airport. Staff at the Glasgow hospital said Abdulla was a diabetes specialist.
Haneef, 27, was being detained in Australia under counterterrorism laws that allow police to hold a suspect without charge as long as a judge agrees there are grounds to do so, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said.
No charges were filed Tuesday, and Keelty stressed it had yet to determine what role””if any””Haneef had in the plots. Officials did not say where he was bound when he was detained.
“The doctor was regarded by the hospital as, in many senses, a model citizen””excellent references and so on,” said Queensland Premier Peter Beattie.
A man arrested late Saturday on a highway in central England was also a physician, Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, police said. A Jordanian official said Asha was of Palestinian descent and carried a Jordanian passport.
Azmi Mahafzah, Asha’s instructor at the University of Jordan medical school, said he knew Asha during his studies and training from 1998 to 2004.
“I didn’t even have the impression that he was religious,” he told The Associated Press. “He interacted with others, both boys and girls. He has no prejudices. He is not a fanatic type of person.”