Doctor Arrested in Australia in Failed Car Bombings

By ERIC PFANNER and RAYMOND BONNER

LONDON, July 3 — The international dimension to the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow seemed to grow today with the detention of an eighth person, in Brisbane, Australia. Like several other people held in connection with the alleged plots, he was a medical worker, the Australian police said.

As the investigation continued, the British authorities, and the public, were confronted with the possibility, at least at home, that a terrorism network, apparently composed at least in part of foreign doctors, had developed within the publicly financed National Health Service. But the case of the Australian detention — of an Indian doctor named Mohammed Haneef, who was detained at the Brisbane airport — was particularly murky.

Mick Keelty, the Australian Federal Police Commissioner, said on national television that Dr. Haneef “is cooperating with us.” As with the others in detention, no charges have been filed.

The doctor is being investigated in connection with terror activities, Mr. Keelty said, but “Dr. Haneef may have done nothing wrong, and may at the end of the day be free to go.”

The Australian attorney general, Philip Ruddock, and Prime Minister John Howard discussed the arrest of the doctor, who studied medicine in Bangalore, India, where he has a family, and subsequently worked in Britain before relocating to Australia.

Dr. Haneef may at one time have been a roommate of one of the detainees in Britain, according to an Australian official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Meanwhile, the British police said today that they had detained two people under the Terrorism Act in northern England. But they said it was “too early to confirm” that they were linked to the events in Glasgow and London.

A spokeswoman for the Lancashire Constabulary said the men were arrested in an industrial park in Blackburn around midday.

Dr. Haneef’s brother, Shuaib Mohammed, 20, reached by telephone in India, insisted that the doctor was innocent. He said that Dr. Haneef, who had been working in Australia since September after moving from Liverpool, was traveling home to see his wife and newborn daughter in Bangalore, India, when he was arrested.

“He is a good Muslim and a clean man,” Shuaib said. “We practice Islam, we believe in Islam. We live in modern Indian culture. Haneef is a modern, religious person. He has not done anything wrong and will bereleased with respect and honor.”

Steve Bosher, manager of the apartment building in Australia where Dr. Haneef lived, expressed shock at the doctor’s arrest, saying he was a quiet man, married but without children, who wore western-style clothing. He said the doctor’s wife, who wore a head scarf, left the apartment several months ago, and that the doctor had told him she had returned to India.

Back in Britain, investigators have been pursuing reports of suspicious vehicles and packages that have attracted heightened attention. Police officers performed what they called a “controlled disruption” on a vehicle in Pollokshields, a neighborhood in Glasgow, and then removed the vehicle after determining that there was no need to evacuate the area.

A similar exercise was carried out on an unattended package in London, near the Hammersmith station on the London Underground. “It turned out to be nothing in the end,” a spokesman for the British Transport Police said.

Though Londoners have generally gone about their business as usual since the failed bombings came to light, the police presence has been stepped up at airports, on city streets and at events like the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

The apparent links to medical workers has troubled many Britons, who are used to thinking of the profession as a bastion of trustworthiness and benevolence, even in an era when many of the workers at National Health Service hospitals are foreigners.

For the public, moreover, the well-educated health professionals arrested in the case so far were a baffling departure from the images of home-grown Islamic terrorists implicated in past plots, who have often been people on the fringe of society with family roots in Pakistan.

As many as five of the arrests in Britain so far appear to have been of people with medical links.

The police now are investigating whether the same people were behind both the attack in Glasgow and the attempted attack in London, a senior Western official said Monday. They had already described the events as linked in the way they were planned and carried out.

British news reports, relatives and a person close to the investigation identified two of the medical doctors detained in Britain as Mohammed Asha, from Jordan, and Bilal Abdullah, from Iraq. A 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool over the weekend may also have been either a medical student or a doctor, a person close to the investigation said.

Dr. Asha, 26, was arrested late Saturday when police officers in unmarked cars boxed in his car on the M6 highway in northwestern England and forced it to a halt. He was accompanied by his wife, who was also arrested.

Dr. Abdullah was seen in amateur recordings as being arrested and led away by the police. British medical records said he qualified in Baghdad in 2004 and had been licensed to practice in British hospitals as a doctor under supervision since August 2006.

There were strong indications on Monday that the Scottish police had been on the trail of two of the attackers on Saturday before they rammed the Jeep Cherokee into the entrance doors of Glasgow airport, setting the car alight. Investigators had used both cellphone and highly sophisticated closed-circuit television technology on Britain’s highways to trace the men, according to several accounts, including one by a Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Law enforcement officials in the United States and Britain said Monday that intelligence agencies investigating the failed attacks had so far discovered no direct link to personnel of Al Qaeda or training camps.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Sunday that “the nature of the threat that we are dealing with is Al Qaeda and people who are related to Al Qaeda.”

But a British security official who spoke on condition of anonymity under government rules said that Mr. Brown, in office for only days, was probably “describing the ideology” of Islamic fundamentalism and that it was “far too early” to speak of a direct link to Qaeda personnel.

A senior Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was “no indication of any outside direction” and “no connection with the United States whatsoever.

“Nothing from phone contacts, nor any other way,” he added. “There has never been any connection of any kind in the U.S.”

The conspiracy to detonate cars laden with gasoline and gas canisters seemed markedly different in its tactics from some recent terrorism plots in Britain — notably the July 7, 2005, suicide bombing attacks on London’s transportation system, which used disaffected young British Muslims and homemade explosives.

A British security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the makers of the London car bombs may have been forced to rely on a crude and ultimately ineffective cocktail of gas canisters and gasoline because of government and police efforts to curb sales of potentially explosive substances like fertilizer and hydrogen peroxide.

A senior Western law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said British investigators had been greatly helped by closed circuit television cameras on Britain’s highways that pick up details of nearly every license plate.

As soon as the police had determined the plate numbers from the cars in central London and from the Jeep that crashed in Glasgow, computers quickly traced the cars’ movements over the past several days.

Cellular phone records have also linked a phone found in one of the abandoned Mercedes sedans in London to a house near Glasgow used by at least one of the people police said were in the Jeep. The discovery was made before the attack on the airport.

Daniel Gardiner, who owns the rental agency that leased the house, said the police had contacted his agency early Saturday to ask about the London car bombs. The attack on Glasgow airport took place at around 3:15 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from London, and Hari Kumar contributed from Delhi.