Doctors plotted "wholesale murder"

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - Two doctors went on trial on Thursday accused of being part of an Islamist cell planning murder "on a wholesale scale" by carrying out car bomb attacks in central London and at a packed Scottish airport last year.

Iraqi Bilal Abdulla, 29, and Jordanian Mohammed Asha, 28, were part of a small group that tried to set off bombs outside a busy nightclub and then tried a dramatic suicide attack by ram-raiding Glasgow Airport when their initial plans failed, the prosecution said.

The men wanted to punish the British people for their country's perceived persecution of Palestinian Muslims and those in Afghanistan and Iraq, the court heard.

"These men were intent on committing murder on an indiscriminate and wholesale scale," prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw told the top security Woolwich Crown Court in east London.

"Apart from the shocking nature of the activity these two defendants were engaged in, the extraordinary thing about this case is that both these defendants are doctors," he said.

"They turned their attention away from the treatment of illness to the planning of murder."

The cell's plans only failed because of a mixture of good fortune and technical mistakes which meant the devices didn't explode, he said.

The first in what the prosecution said was to be a series of "spectaculars" was planned for central London. Two Mercedes cars packed with gas canisters, fuel containers and nails, were driven down from Scotland and in the early hours of June 29, 2007, left in the busy West End area of the capital.  Continued...