"Cryptic al-Qaida warning of U.K. bombs?"

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Cryptic al-Qaida warning of U.K. bombs? 
'Those who cure you are going to kill you,' terror leader allegedly said 
The Associated Press


LONDON - "Those who cure you are going to kill you."

That, a British priest said Wednesday, was the cryptic warning made to him
in Jordan by a purported al-Qaida chief months before the failed car
bombings in London and Glasgow that have been linked to a group of foreign
Muslims working as doctors in Britain.

British authorities have said the attacks bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaida
operation, but security officials say investigators are still trying to
determine whether there was any direct link between the alleged plotters and
an outside mastermind.

Canon Andrew White, a senior Anglican priest who works in Baghdad, said he
met the man privately with a translator and sheik after holding talks with
Sunni Muslim tribal and religious leaders April 18 in the Jordanian capital,
Amman. He meets regularly with extremists in an attempt to calm Iraq's
sectarian violence.

He said religious leaders told him the man was an al-Qaida leader who
traveled from Syria to the meeting. The man, an educated Iraqi in his 40s
and dressed in Western clothes, warned of attacks on Britain and the United
States, White said.

'Like meeting the devil'

"It was like meeting the devil," he told The Associated Press in a telephone
interview from Baghdad. "He talked of destroying Britain and the United
States and then 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. He said he passed the general threat
along to Britain's Foreign Office, but did not mention the comment that
could be interpreted as hinting at the involvement of doctors in a terror
plot.

Then came the news that six physicians were among the eight suspects
detained in the failed attacks in Britain.

"As soon as I heard many of the suspects were doctors I remembered those
words," he said. "I work with a lot of people who are not necessarily good
people. It becomes very difficult to distinguish what threat is real and
what is not."

White said he gave the man's identity to the Foreign Office but would not
say publicly what it was. He also said he gave the same details to American
authorities in Baghdad.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office, who spoke on condition of anonymity in
line with government policy, denied White relayed the man's identify but
confirmed he reported his meeting with the alleged al-Qaida leader.

He also said that White did not pass on the reference alluding to medical
practitioners and that because his information was vague it "didn't really
merit further analysis." But White's report has now been given to British
police in their investigation, the spokesman said.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, announced that Britain will increase
its scrutiny of foreigners recruited for their skills, including doctors
coming to work for the National Health Service, which employed all eight
suspects in the failed car bombings.

"We'll expand the background checks that have been done where there are
highly skilled migrant workers coming into this country," Brown told the
House of Commons in his first appearance at the weekly prime minister's
questions.

The government also lowered its terrorism threat level one step to "severe"
from "critical" - the highest on a five-point scale. Officials said Tuesday
that investigators believe the main plotters had been rounded up, though
others on the periphery were being hunted.

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," Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said
in a statement.

New message from bin Laden?

An Internet site deemed close to al-Qaida's leadership announced on
Wednesday that "good news" will be coming soon. The flashing red banner was
interpreted by several other Islamist Web sites as a sign that Osama bin
Laden would issue a new taped message soon. Such announcements have usually
been followed by an al-Qaida tape release within two or three days.

Several of the arrested men in the British plot were on a watch list
compiled by the domestic intelligence agency MI5, a British government
security official said, indicating their identities previously had been
logged by agents. The official did not say why they were put on the watch
list.

"Some, but not all, have turned up in a check of the databases, but they are
not linked to any previous incident," the security official said, speaking
on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the material.

The official said Britain's security services are watching about 1,600
people and have details logged about hundreds more.

The Evening Standard said one suspect on the list had posted a comment on an
Internet chat room condemning Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet
Muhammad in a derogatory way. The newspaper, which cited unidentified
intelligence sources for the information, did not say which suspect.

The Times of London said one of the eight people in custody, Iraqi-born
physician Bilal Abdulla, reportedly had links to radical Islamic groups and
several others were linked to extremist radicals listed on the MI5 database.

Abdulla was a passenger in the Jeep that smashed into Glasgow's airport.
Investigators believe the same men who parked two explosives-laden Mercedes
cars in London may have also driven the blazing SUV in Glasgow, officials
say.

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," Maher told BBC television's "Newsnight."

He said Abdulla berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough,
showing him a beheading video and warning that could happen to him. Maher
said Abdulla also claimed to have a number of videos of the then-leader of
al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike
last year.

Abdulla had been disciplined by his employers at the Royal Alexandra
Hospital, outside Glasgow, for spending too much time on the Internet,
according to hospital staff, suggesting the plot may have been planned in
cyberspace.

Computers seized

Police seized several computers from hospitals in Glasgow, Stoke-on-Kent and
Liverpool.

While information held on the MI5 database did not alert authorities to the
impending attacks, it did help police round up suspects quickly, British
media reported, quoting several unidentified government sources.

The eight suspects include one doctor from Iraq and two from India. Also in
custody are a physician from Lebanon and a Jordanian doctor and his medical
assistant wife. Another doctor and a medical student are thought to be from
the Middle East, possibly Saudi Arabia.

No one has yet been charged in the plot.

The family of one suspect - Muhammad Haneef, a 27-year-old doctor from India
arrested Monday in Australia - professed his innocence. Haneef worked in
2005 at Halton Hospital near Liverpool in northern England, hospital
spokesman Mark Shone has said.

"He is innocent," Qurat-ul-ain, Haneef's mother, told AP in the southern
Indian city of Bangalore.

Another Indian national arrested in Liverpool was Sabeel Ahmed, a
26-year-old doctor whose family in Bangalore said Wednesday that he was
related to Haneef but did not say how.

"Both these boys are just caught in between," his mother, Zakia Ahmed, who
also is a doctor, said in front of her home in an upscale neighborhood about
7.5 miles from Haneef's home.

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