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In Hunt for Bomb Plotters, Britain
Sees a Qaeda Link
By ALAN COWELL and RAYMOND BONNER
Published: July 2, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/world/europe/02britain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
LONDON, Monday, July 2 — With their investigation
moving at breakneck speed, the police expanded their
hunt on Sunday for the plotters of attempted car
bomb attacks in London and Glasgow that the British
government called the work of terrorists linked to
Al Qaeda. Officers raided homes in three cities and
arrested another suspect, bringing the total to
five, including at least one identified as a medical
doctor.
The police said they had recovered a rich trove of
evidence from the vehicles and from video
surveillance after two car bombs failed to explode
in London on Friday and two men rammed a Jeep
Cherokee into the entrance of Glasgow Airport on
Saturday. The events prompted the British
authorities to raise their terrorism threat
assessment to its highest level — “critical,”
meaning another attack is imminent.
One of the detainees was a medical doctor of
Iranian-Kurdish descent, according to two people
with knowledge of the police inquiry. One of those
people, and a BBC report, identified him as Mohammed
Asha, 26, and a newspaper, The Sun, said he worked
at North Staffordshire hospital near the Midlands
town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, where the police
searched a house on Sunday. The man was arrested
along with a 27-year-old woman when the police
pulled over a car in a dramatic operation on the M6
highway in northwest England late on Saturday.
A second detainee may have been a hospital worker in
Glasgow, a person with knowledge of the inquiry
said. On Sunday, the police carried out a controlled
explosion on a car in the parking lot of a hospital
near Glasgow where one of the bombers was in
critical condition with severe burns after attacking
Glasgow Airport. The police said the car was linked
to the bombers but did not explain how.
None of the five suspects are British citizens, a
senior Western official said.
The disclosures altered the thinking among security
experts about the nature of the seemingly amateurish
attack plans, raising questions about how exactly
the bombers were tied to Al Qaeda.
They noted that gas canisters found with the Jeep
apparently did not detonate — and were unlikely to
have done so without a more powerful catalyst than
ignited gasoline.
Despite the British government’s assertions of a
link to Al Qaeda, it presented no evidence of
connections to Al Qaeda operatives or those who
derive inspiration from the group. British
intelligence agencies had warned the government last
April that terrorist attacks might be initiated by
Iranian Kurds to coincide with the end of Prime
Minister Tony Blair’s term of office, according to a
person who saw the warning. Mr. Blair handed power
to Gordon Brown last Wednesday.
The government has not confirmed that report, and it
is unclear precisely why Iranian Kurds would be
aggrieved. But a radical Kurdish group, Ansar
al-Islam, was largely driven out of northern Iraq
four years ago when American and British forces
overthrew Saddam Hussein, and it has since found a
haven in Iran, security officials have said.
The people with knowledge of the inquiry requested
anonymity because they were not authorized to talk
to reporters. But Scottish officials said publicly
that the two attackers who rammed the Jeep packed
with gas canisters and gasoline into the entrance to
Glasgow Airport were not from Scotland.
Mr. Brown said in a nationally televised interview,
“We will not yield, we will not be intimidated and
we will not allow anyone to undermine our British
way of life.”
Britons already were edgy because of the looming
anniversary of the July 7, 2005, London transit
bombings, the country’s worst terrorist attack, and
Mr. Brown said the country was dealing with a
“long-term threat.”
“It is not going to go away in the next few weeks or
months, ” he said. He added that Britain was
“dealing, in general terms, with people who are
associated with Al Qaeda.”
This is the first crisis for Mr. Brown as prime
minister. It remains unclear whether the location of
the Glasgow car bombing was inspired by Mr. Brown’s
Scottish heritage.
Anxiety about events in Britain rippled across the
Atlantic. “It just goes to show the war on these
extremists goes on,” President Bush said as he
waited for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to
arrive at his family vacation compound in
Kennebunkport, Me. “You never know where they might
strike.”
The authorities at Heathrow, one of Europe’s busiest
airports, briefly closed Terminal 3 while a
suspicious package was investigated, which turned
out to be harmless.
Security experts and officials said that unlike most
other terrorist attacks, when evidence is destroyed
by explosions, the police have retrieved forensic
evidence from vehicles and closed-circuit television
and detained several suspects within hours of
discovering suspicious acts.
The police said Sunday that officers had searched
homes at three locations — at Houston, near Glasgow,
in southern Liverpool and in the Midlands location
of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire. One
26-year-old man was arrested in Liverpool, the
police said. The authorities have not identified any
of the suspects.
Witnesses described the Glasgow bombers as being of
South Asian descent. “The people we have in custody
came to Scotland a short while ago to seek work,” a
senior police officer, John Neilson, said at a
meeting of Scottish Muslims in the Central Mosque in
Glasgow. “These are not your young people.”
Scotland’s justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, said
the two attackers who slammed the Jeep Cherokee into
the check-in area entrance of Glasgow Airport on
Saturday were not “born and bred here.”
“Any suggestion to be made that they are home-grown
terrorists is not true,” he said.
Senior counterterrorism officers said that even with
a rapid investigation, it could take weeks to sift
through a mass of evidence.
“We are learning a great deal about the people who
were involved in the attacks,” Peter Clarke,
Britain’s highest-ranking counterterrorism police
officer, said at a news conference in Glasgow. He
said the link between failed car bombings in London
and the attack on Glasgow airport “are becoming ever
clearer,” and he called the investigation “extremely
fast-moving.”
Like the cars discovered Friday in London, the Jeep
used in Glasgow was carrying propane gas containers.
The car had not been stolen, the police said. The
similarities involving the three car bombs have
convinced investigators that they are linked,
security officials in several countries said.
In the past, some Muslim leaders have said Britain’s
military actions in Islamic countries, notably Iraq
and Afghanistan, has made it vulnerable to attack
from disaffected members of its own Muslim minority
of around 1.6 million. But Mr. Brown seemed focused
more on blaming Al Qaeda.
“Irrespective of Afghanistan, irrespective of what
is happening in different parts of the world, we
have an international organization trying to inflict
the maximum damage on civilian life in pursuit of a
terrorist cause that is totally unacceptable to most
people,” he said. Mr. Brown’s newly appointed
counterterrorism adviser, Sir John Stevens, a former
Scotland Yard police chief, said the car bombs
signaled “a major escalation in the war being waged
on us by Islamic terrorists.”
“It is not simply the horror of yet more attempts at
mass murder that is so chilling — but the change in
the psychotic thought processes behind it,” he said
in a column in The News of the World. “Now it is
clear a loose but deadly network of interlinked
operational cells has developed.”
“Al Qaeda has imported the tactics of Baghdad and
Bali onto the streets of the U.K.,” he said.
In Liverpool, witnesses said the police moved in
with dogs while a helicopter hovered to raid a
modest row house at 80 Ramiles Road. “I saw
policemen outside the house with guns,” a neighbor,
Declan Murphy, 22, told The Press Association news
agency. “They seemed to cover each other going to
and from the house pointing their guns at the front
door and the upper window.”
Rachal Tansey, 27, said the raid happened after
midnight “when I heard dogs barking.”
“I looked out of the bathroom window and saw men
with big guns, and they barged into No. 80,” The
Press Association quoted her as saying. “There was a
bit of a commotion.”
In Scotland, the police searched a house in Houston,
about 15 minutes’ drive from Glasgow airport.
Officers cordoned off a two-story house in Neuk
Crescent. Plainclothes officers went door to door,
talking to residents, while half a dozen officers
stood guard in a torrential rain.
Several local residents who ducked under the police
tape to reach their homes said they did not know or
have any contact with the two Asian men who were
living in the house and who they believed were
renting it. Estimates given to different journalists
of how long the men had lived there varied from two
weeks to six months.
John Reid, who lives nearby, said he knew most of
his neighbors but never had contact with the two
men.
“For all you’d know, it could have been an empty
house because you never saw anyone at all,” he said.
Mr. Reid said he was shocked to hear that terrorism
had come to Scotland. “Before, we never had anything
like this, it seems quite far away,” he said. “But
now, it’s outside your front door.”
A Western official with access to British and
American intelligence reports said it was “not
surprising” that a woman had been arrested. In the
past, police have arrested women accused of helping
terrorists by failing to report suspects to the
police.
But if the 27-year-old woman arrested on the M6 is
directly involved in a terrorist attack on a Western
country, it would be highly unusual and perhaps
unprecedented, the official said, requesting
anonymity because he was not authorized to brief
reporters.
“We’ve always worked on the assumption, given that
many women share the same ideology as the men, that
it was only a matter of time before women became
involved,” the official said. |
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