British PM Cracks Down on Foreign Medics

By PAISLEY DODDS
Associated Press Writer

10:03 AM PDT, July 4, 2007

LONDON — The British government said Wednesday that it had reduced the level of the terrorist threat facing the country from "critical" to "severe."

The level was raised to critical -- the highest on a five-point scale -- on Saturday after failed attacks on Glasgow and London, meaning that further attacks were thought to be imminent. The country has not been lower than the "severe" level, meaning that further attacks are considered likely, since August, 2006.

In a statement, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said the reduction "does not mean the overall threat has gone away -- there remains a serious and real threat against the United Kingdom and I would again ask that the public remain vigilant."

The decision to reduce the threat level was made by the government's Joint Terrorism Analysis Center.

Earlier Wednesday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the government will expand checks on immigrants taking skilled jobs and review recruiting for the National Health Service, which employed all eight suspects in last week's foiled terror plots.

A government security official said several of the men had been on a British intelligence watch list.

One of the suspects on the list had posted a comment on an Internet chat room condemning cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published last year in Danish newspapers, The Evening Standard reported, citing unidentified intelligence sources.

A senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said none of the eight suspects was on any American lists of potential terror suspects.

It was unclear why the other suspects might have been put on the British list. One suspect, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, reportedly had links to radical Islamic groups, and several others were linked to extremist radicals listed on the database of MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, The Times of London reported.

The suspects were arrested in a series of raids across Britain after two car bombs failed to explode in London on Friday and two men tried to drive a vehicle loaded with gas cylinders into the main terminal at Glasgow's airport on Saturday.

"Some, but not all, have turned up in a check of the databases, but they are not linked to any previous incident," the official said on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the material. The official said Britain's security services are currently watching around 1,600 people and have details logged of hundreds more.

Shiraz Maher, a former member of a radical Islamic group, said he knew Abdulla at Cambridge University.

"He was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq. ... He supported the insurgency in Iraq. He actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq," he told BBC television's "Newsnight."

He said Abdulla berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, showing him a beheading video and warning this could happen to him. He also said he had a number of videos of al-Qaida's former leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year.

Abdulla had been disciplined at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, outside Glasgow, for spending too much time on the Internet, according to the Evening Standard.

Meanwhile, a senior British cleric working in Baghdad said Wednesday that he met with a suspected al-Qaida leader in Jordan in April who warned of several British attacks and issued a cryptic warning.

"It was so awful that, in my update for the day, I wrote that I have met with the devil today," Canon Andrew White told British Broadcasting Corp. radio. "At one moment in the meeting he said, 'Those who cure you are going to kill you.'"

White -- who runs Baghdad's only Anglican parish and has been involved in several hostage negotiations in Iraq -- said he did not understand the threat's significance at the time. Although he said he passed the general threat warning on to Britain's Foreign Office, White said he did not mention the comment, who could be interpreted as hinting at the involvement of doctors.