LONDON, 15 July 2007 — Two more people — a man in the UK and his cousin in Australia — have been charged in connection with the failed car bomb attacks in central London and Glasgow Airport on June 30.
Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, 26, of Liverpool who worked at the Halton Hospital in Runcorn, Cheshire, was charged yesterday under the Terrorism Act with having information that could have prevented an act of terrorism. He will appear at the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London tomorrow.
Earlier yesterday, police in Brisbane, Australia charged Dr. Mohammed Haneef with providing “reckless support” to a terrorist organization. He appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court late yesterday afternoon for a bail hearing and was remanded in custody by Magistrate Jacqui Payne until tomorrow. Prosecutors are opposing bail for Haneef, saying he could flee the country if released.
Haneef, supported by his family in Bangalore, has denied any involvement in the alleged attacks, but the Australian police have confirmed that they have concrete evidence that he allegedly provided mobile phone SIM cards to his cousins Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed. He went to work at the Gold Coast Hospital in Queensland, after an initial tenure at a National Health Service (NHS) hospital in the UK.
Queensland prosecutor Clive Porritt told Brisbane Magistrates Court that Haneef would have known about the Ahmed brothers’ alleged links to terrorism because he once shared a house with them in the UK. “These are people who he lived with, may have worked with, and certainly associated with,” Porritt said.
Scotland Yard counterterrorism officers tracked a SIM card found on one of the men accused in the failed UK bomb attacks to Haneef, and alerted their Australian counterparts. If convicted, Haneef faces a maximum 15 years in prison.
Haneef’s lawyer, Stephen Keim, stressed that his client only left the SIM card with Sabeel Ahmed so his cousin could take advantage of a special deal on his mobile phone plan. It is not clear whether the SIM card was used in the foiled attacks.
He stressed that it would be impossible for his client to leave Australia because he had surrendered his passport to the police and his photograph has been plastered in the media for the past two weeks. “Whatever flight risk he represented two weeks ago, he doesn’t represent now,” Keim argued.
This brings the number of people charged in connection with the above terror plot to three. On July 6, Iraqi Dr. Bilal Talal Samad Abdullah was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions and sent to trial at the Old bailey on July 27. He was arrested at the Glasgow Airport incident.
Altogether eight people including Haneef were arrested. Of them, Marwah Asha, a laboratory technician and wife of one of the detained, Dr. Mohammed Asha, was unconditionally released Friday. Three suspects are still being questioned at the high-security Paddington Green police station in Edgware Road, while a fourth — Kafeel Ahmed, the other alleged terrorist in the Glasgow incident and the brother of Sabeel Ahmed, is in a critical condition at the Royal Glasgow Infirmary after sustaining 90 percent burns when he set himself alight in the seemingly suicide attack on Glasgow Airport. Doctors have warned that his condition is so severe that it is unlikely that he will survive his injuries.
The charges come after the discovery of two Mercedes saloon cars containing petrol and propane gas cylinders and a cocktail of nails and bolts in Haymarket outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub and Cockspur Street in central London on the morning of June 30. Due to faulty connections, the detonators failed to explode.
