A second doctor who has also worked in the UK is being questioned by Australian police but has not been arrested.

In the UK’s high state of alert following the failed attacks, police have carried out a series of controlled explosions on a car parked outside a Glasgow mosque.

Police have also carried out a controlled explosion on a suspect package at Hammersmith station in west London, although this is now not thought to be connected to the terror attacks.

In a development that will raise questions over the vetting procedures for medics from abroad, it has emerged that five of the seven suspects held by British police are young Middle Eastern men employed at British hospitals.

One is Mohammed Asha, a “brilliant” neurosurgeon from Jordan. Another being questioned over both the London and Glasgow attacks is Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi junior doctor who was a passenger in the car that rammed Glasgow airport.

The driver of the Jeep Cherokee -who suffered 90 per cent burns after setting himself on fire in the attack – is said to be a locum doctor working at the hospital where he is now being treated.

Two of his colleagues at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, Renfrewshire, were also arrested yesterday and another junior doctor is understood to have been the man police arrested in Liverpool.

Disclosures of the suspected terrorists’ backgrounds – which came as the hunt for any others who may have been connected to the terrorist incidents continued – surprised detectives and the intelligence services.

Five men have been arrested, while a sixth, the Jeep driver, is under police guard in hospital. He was operated on yesterday but doctors said his chances of survival were slim.

He has not been officially arrested because detectives are waiting for him to recover and do not want to trigger the 28-day maximum time limit for detaining him as a terrorism suspect.

The seventh person arrested is Dr Asha’s wife.

The Muslim Council of Great Britain today said is was the “Islamic duty” of Muslims to help the security forces fight terrorism.

From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/03/nterror103.xml&page;=1

Health Direct considers the new terrorist threat- Doctors

Given that Osama’s number two is a surgeon, maybe we should take more care.

It would appear that all of the men behind the weekend’s bungled terror attacks were doctors of medicine, at least two of whom were working in Scotland. Indeed the car bombs discovered in London’s West End were apparently driven from Scotland down to the capital.

One hopes that they were better doctors than they were terrorists.

Arriving in this country as doctors provided excellent cover stories – ‘deep cover’ in the intelligence jargon. What better way to sneak into the UK?

It’s a clever move by al-Qaeda’s recruiters. Astoundingly, we now discover the checks on doctors from abroad allowed to work in the UK are confined to validating medical qualifications.

Given that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s number two, is a trained surgeon, maybe we need to be a little more inquisitive about doctors who come here from the Middle East.

By day, apparently, these men were assiduous in their professional duties. By night they were scheming Jihadist terrorists waiting for their moment to strike and kill hundreds of innocents, some of whom would have been their patients, as they flew off on their summer holidays from Glasgow airport.

And no one suspected a thing. Or at least that is what we are asked to believe.

It is a huge relief that these terrorists are not British born and bred. We do not have to go through the agonies of confronting ‘the enemy within’ as we did in the summer of 2005.

Although they fit in nicely with a long British tradition of murderous medical men – Drs Crippen and Shipman immediately spring to mind – crucially, these men are foreigners.

Foreigners have to be granted permission to come here and have to pass through our border controls.

Because the July 2005 bombers were British, the debate about our pathetic border regime died down. Expect it to return with a vengeance.