Role of Foreign Doctors Draws Scrutiny in British Inquiry

By MARK LANDLER and SARAH LYALL

LONDON, July 4 — Britain will conduct an urgent review of its methods for recruiting foreign doctors, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced today, after it emerged that all eight of the people detained in the aftermath of the failed car bombings here last week are from the medical profession.

Speaking in Parliament in his first appearance at the prime minister’s weekly question time, Mr. Brown said the government would also expand its worldwide “watch list” of potential terrorists.

“It is vitally important the message is sent out to the rest of the world that we will stand strong, steadfast, and united in the face of terror,” said Mr. Brown, who was confronted with the terrorism plot within hours of his ascension to the prime minister’s office last week.

His comments came as police appeared to have rounded up the main perpetrators in the plot to blow up two cars in central London and an attack on the Glasgow airport, in which two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee into the arrivals hall and set the vehicle ablaze.

Police are virtually certain they have arrested the main suspects, a police official said today, speaking on condition of anonymity. The police are now turning their attention to unraveling links and prior contacts within the circle of doctors who are from several Middle Eastern and South Asian countries.

The police official said that within a day or so he expected the authorities to reduce the terrorist threat level in Britain from “critical” — its highest level, meaning that a terrorism attack is imminent — to “severe.”

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that the judgment on the threat level would be made by Britain’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Center. “That is something that will be determined on the basis of intelligence, when it is the right time to do,” she said, while on a visit to a housing estate in southeast London. “That is obviously the way it should be.”

The revelation that all eight people arrested following the bungled car bombings are from the medical profession has rattled a national heath service that has long relied on foreign doctors to fill its understaffed hospitals.

The seven men are physicians, according to a British police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, while the lone woman, the wife of one, is a laboratory technician. For the British public, the prospect of highly educated professionals as terror suspects is a chilling departure from the home-grown Muslim terrorists, many with family roots in Pakistan, who have been implicated in previous conspiracies here.

It may also prompt a debate over whether Britain’s health system should have tightened its regulations for hiring foreign doctors before last year, when it was possible for doctors to move here and practice without a work permit, provided they established their medical credentials.

“Clearly, it will be debated,” said Soroosh Firoozan, an Iranian-born cardiologist who practices near Oxford. “There has already been a bit of a move to exclude foreign doctors from training in the U.K.”

With Britain still jittery after the failed attacks, the police on Tuesday evacuated parts of London’s Heathrow Airport following a security scare, stranding hundreds of passengers in a rainstorm. They also carried out “controlled explosions” near a subway station here and outside a mosque in Glasgow.

The police on Tuesday arrested two more men on suspicion of terrorism after reports that canisters of gas were delivered to an industrial site in Blackburn, in northwest England. Officials would not say whether these arrests were linked to the incidents in London and Glasgow, in which gas canisters were also used.

Yet the most unsettling news may have been fresh details about the men linked to the plot to detonate two car-bombs in London’s West End, and the attack the following day in Glasgow.

The driver of the vehicle was another doctor, named Khalid Ahmed, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation. Footage of Dr. Ahmed after the incident, shown on British television on Tuesday, appeared to show a young man. He was severely burned in the fire, and is under guard in a hospital near Glasgow.

Also on Tuesday, Britain’s BBC-2 broadcast an interview with Shiraz Maher, a former member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical Islamic group, who described himself as a onetime friend of Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor who was in the Jeep with Dr. Ahmed and is also under arrest.

Mr. Maher said he had known Dr. Abdullah when both men were students in Cambridge, two years ago and believed the man he knew then was the same person in the airport attack.

There was no immediate corroboration of his association with Dr. Abdullah. But Mr. Maher described him as strongly opposed to the occupation of Iraq and to the rise of Shiite power in Iraq.

Britain’s National Health Service has long relied on skilled foreign doctors to meet staffing shortfalls, and foreigners have long been drawn to its relatively generous salaries and exacting standards of training. Of the nearly 239,000 doctors registered with the General Medical Council, some 90,000 qualified in countries other than the United Kingdom.

While foreign doctors have always had to pass a battery of tests to prove their qualifications and fitness to practice, the rules were tightened last year. Now, most foreign doctors are required to obtain work permits for specific jobs, reducing their chances of finding work.

At least two of the suspects in this case — Dr. Abdullah and Mohammed Asha, a Saudi-born Palestinian — are believed to have come to Britain before this new law took effect.

On Tuesday, the prime minister, Mr. Brown announced that his government would set up a new national security council to respond to international threats to Britain’s security. “At all times, we will be vigilant, and we will never yield,” Mr. Brown said in a speech to Parliament.

But the nature and scope of this latest threat remains frustratingly elusive. The doctors come from countries scattered across the Middle East and South Asia, according to security officials and news reports.

While their professional status may have accorded them an uncommon degree of trust in British society, security officials said there was little else to suggest that their profession would predispose them to carry out unsophisticated bomb attacks of the sort attempted in London and Glasgow.

“If they were to use their position to gain access to radiological or biological materials, then there would be an advantage,” said a security official who spoke in return for anonymity under government rules.

Doctors and law-enforcement officials struggled to explain what might have drawn these men into violence.

“There’s no explanation at this stage why they’re doctors, other than that it’s a perfect cover,” a police official said, on condition of anonymity. “It seems at odds with their profession, which is to look after people.”

Abhay Chopada, a colorectal surgeon who emigrated from India in 1994, said that the suspects should be thought of “not as doctors, but as terrorists.” Perhaps they had been radicalized by the Iraq war and brought their grievances with them to Britain, he said.

Prasad Rao, chairman of the British International Doctors’ Association, called the apparent link to terrorism “beyond belief.”

“Even if I were to come across my enemy, my duty is to heal the sick,” he said. “How could I remotely plan to kill and maim innocent people? I have no words to describe this.”

However, Sandy Bell, the director of homeland security at the Royal United Services Institute, a private policy research body, said that she found it plausible that doctors could become terrorists.

“In the end, these people are attracted to the U.K., to the medical profession, because they are dedicated and bright,” she said in an interview. “That not only makes them attractive to any profession, but also to terrorist organizations. It doesn’t surprise me that they have been targeted.”

While the National Health Service has put steps in place to vet foreign doctors thoroughly, there are other potential weak links in the system, notably in the checking of prior criminal records.

Prospective employers are required to check for such records. But while Britain’s Criminal Records Bureau can weed out applicants who are known to have committed crimes in Britain, it is unclear how effectively the health service can discover evidence of criminal activity in other countries.

“We would expect an employer to ask a doctor who is being appointed from overseas to bring their own evidence of police clearance in their home country,” NHS Employers, a group that works on employment issues for health-service organizations, said in a statement.

“While doing all they can to prevent unsuitable people taking up employment in the NHS, employers also have a duty to look after the rights of their staff, and this includes not discriminating against employees in any way on the grounds of their religion or belief,” the group said.

On Tuesday, the Royal Alexandra Hospital, where at least one of the suspects was employed, was under heavy police guard.

Muslim leaders have condemned the plot promptly and vigorously. But some fret that a backlash is inevitable. Omara Saeed, a leader in the Muslim community in Glasgow, said that on Monday night, vandals drove a car into a Muslim-owned grocery store in a northeast section of the city.

“The integration of the Muslim community has been smooth to a point,” said Naim Raza, president of the Islamic Society of Scotland. “This attack will put those relations to the test.”

On Monday night, Glasgow police impounded a car in the parking lot of a mosque, as part of their investigation into Saturday’s airport attack. Bomb experts set off a controlled explosion in the car, and forensic officials were searching it for evidence, a police spokeswoman said.

Khaliq Ansari, secretary of the Noor Mosque, said the police had told him the vehicle belonged to one of the four suspects arrested in connection with the attacks in Scotland.

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

At Heathrow Airport, a security alert caused chaos in Terminal 4, the main international terminal for British Airways. After authorities discovered a suspicious package just before midday, they evacuated the departure zone, forcing passengers onto the sidewalks outside.

The public was allowed back into the building at 5 p.m., but British Airways canceled 108 flights to European destinations, while arriving planes languished for hours on the tarmac.

“There’s no point stressing about it,” said Maria Dekeersmaeker, a Belgian sales executive trapped on a flight from Brussels. “It’s best to get the correct attitude about every travel situation.”

Officials in Washington said that one angle investigators are pursuing is the possibility that the attacks in Britain had their origins not in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where most large-scale Al Qaeda attacks are believed to be hatched, but inside Iraq.

They said there was the possibility that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the branch that has fueled sectarian violence inside Iraq for years, had a hand in the operation. But officials said it was far too soon to draw any firm conclusions.

“At this point, the needle seems to be pointing more toward Iraq than Pakistan, but we’re still in the very early stage,” an American official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss a British investigation.

Reporting was contributed by Raymond Bonner, Alan Cowell, and Stephen Castle from London; Victoria Burnett and Ginger Thompson from Glasgow; and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.