Vehicles of terror

Security services were expected to be vigilant close to the second anniversary of 7/7, yet the terror plot went undetected.

HASAN SUROOR in London

Who poses a greater threat to British "values" and its way of life? That semi-literate neigbourhood foreign "imam" with his regressive world view? Or those urbane and well-heeled foreign professionals next door?

Until the attempted bombings in London and Glasgow on June 29 and 30, anyone asking such a question would have been considered daft and greeted with the predictable reply: "The imam, of course." And you would have been given a whole lot of perfectly sensible reasons why they believed these "fundamentalists" from the backwaters of Pakistan and Bangladesh, with no understanding of British culture, were such a dangerous influence on vulnerable young British-born Muslims.

Indeed, much of the British government's counter-terror strategy in the wake of the London bombings of July 7, 2005, was built around the idea that half the battle would be won if it was able to protect the "disaffected, alienated" Muslim youth from mad foreign mullahs. Mosques were told to clean up their act, restrictions were imposed on the entry of foreign imams and a scheme was launched to train home-grown English-speaking preachers.

That strategy has taken a knock after last month's failed terror plot, suspected to have been hatched and executed by foreign doctors and engineers. Another assumption that has been turned on its head by the events is that the enemy lies within; that the threat, essentially, is from socially and culturally alienated indigenous young Muslims who have been brainwashed and radicalised by Islamist groups. Lack of education and unemployment among British Muslims, especially those from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and their sense of "deprivation" are routinely given as reasons for their turn to extremism. This became the conventional wisdom after the July 7 London attacks which were carried out by British-born terrorists of Pakistani origin.

As The Economist noted, the focus of the government strategy after 7/7 was "discouraging more home-grown bombers". This meant granting more powers to the police to monitor suspects and introducing other measures to "stop young men falling under the spell of wacky imams".

But then came the June plot and it seemed that many of the assumptions behind the government's anti-terror strategy were flawed. None of the eight alleged suspects in police custody fits the profile of a "typical" terrorist. They were not born and bred in Britain (one was born in Britain but grew up in Iraq) but came here only recently. Some did not even intend to stay on here permanently and were already looking for greener pastures in Australia. There is no evidence that they had personal grievances against the British government or had been victims of religious or racial discrimination that may have "alienated" them from British society. There is also no evidence that they were inspired or supported by any organised domestic extremist group.

Most importantly, all were professionally successful: five doctors, one highly qualified engineer and two medical students. (Only six have been identified: Bilal Abdullah, Kafeel Ahmed, Kafeel's brother Sabeel, Mohammed Asha and his wife Marwah; and Mohammed Haneef, held in Australia.) They are the sort of high-skilled professional migrants that the British government has been wooing. Equally significantly, at least three came from India where the Muslim community, it had been assumed, had escaped the virus of extremism.

The backgrounds of the alleged suspects disproved the notion that only imams from Gilgit were dangerous. Security services admitted that they had no clue that foreign doctors working in the National Health Service (NHS) were planning an attack. There is a view that everyone from the government to the security agencies got it wrong and it is time the strategy was reviewed.

"The rhetoric of the government and its advisers had, over the past couple of years, focussed on the danger from foreign imams. It now seems that resources would have been better spent clamping down on foreign doctors. While Britain's security apparatus was still struggling to understand the scale of the threat from home-grown radicals, the jehad opened another front among sleepers working within the country's most revered institution [NHS],'' wrote New Statesman's political editor Martin Bright.

For the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, with absolutely no experience of handling law and order, the June plot was baptism by fire. Brown was only into his second day in office when the first attack happened. On June 29, two Mercedes cars packed with explosives were found in London's West End, the heart of the city's entertainment and tourist district. The area, not far from Downing Street and Whitehall, is dotted with theatres, nightclubs and restaurants. One car was found outside a popular nightclub, "Tiger Tiger", in Haymarket; and the second near Trafalgar Square, just a short walk from Haymarket. According to the police, the two "car bombs'' seemed planned to go off simultaneously or immediately one after the other in a coordinated attempt to cause maximum panic and loss of lives. "Hundreds'' of people might have been killed if the bombs had gone off, said the head of Scotland Yard's counter-terror command Peter Clarke.

Barely 24 hours later, while the government was still getting its head round the West End incidents, there was more bad news - this time from Scotland, Brown's own backyard. The Glasgow International Airport was heaving with holidaymakers waiting to catch their flights when two men drove a burning Jeep Cherokee into the terminal building in an audacious bid to blow up the airport. A bloodbath was averted because the jeep failed to break through the glass front. Within a space of two days, the country was twice lucky in that the terrorists' best-laid plans did not work. But what if the - "terror clowns" - as the alleged suspects have been dubbed because of their failure to get their act together - had succeeded? The scale of the tragedy would have been much bigger than even the 7/7 attacks, which claimed 52 lives.

It is disturbing that the terrorists were able to go even as far as they did without being detected by security services - and, so close to the second anniversary of "7/7'' when the security establishment was expected to be extra vigilant. It is important to point out that the London "car bombs'' were not discovered by the police. One was noticed by a passing ambulance crew while the other was found by chance after the vehicle had been towed to a car pound. Again, it was sheer luck that the suicide attack on Glasgow Airport failed. It was not "foiled" as pointed out by The Hindu editorial.

Understandably, there have been allegations of intelligence failure. While the police claimed that they had no information about an impending attack, media reports, which have not been denied, said that an intelligence monitoring group based in MI5's London headquarters had warned of a "possible terror plot" to coincide with Tony Blair's departure. How hard was the evidence on which the warning was based, and was it passed to the men on the ground? These are questions that need to be answered in order to restore public confidence in the intelligence and security services. Neither came out looking good though the speed with which they were able to track down the alleged suspects helped them redeem their reputation to an extent.

For Britain's overseas doctors, all this has been bad news and the writing on the wall is already clear. It is now official that they are to be subjected to a more stringent vetting regime before they are considered for employment in the NHS. Doctors from India fear that they are likely to face greater scrutiny because of the Indian "connection'' to the London-Glasgow plot. Ramesh Mehta, president of the British Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, acknowledged that there was a great deal of "worry" among Indian doctors. Already, some 10,000 doctors from India are struggling to find jobs as a result of new immigration rules, which are discriminatory towards overseas doctors outside the European Union. Things can only become more difficult for them.

Muslim doctors are particularly concerned. "If a doctor is identifiable as a Muslim because of the beard or the hijab, we are worried that the trust between a doctor and a patient could be compromised,'' said a spokesman for the Federation of Student Islamic Societies.

So far, fears of a social backlash have proved unfounded. Unlike Australia where apparently some patients refused to be seen by Indian/Muslim doctors, there has been no such case in Britain. But anxiety remains and as one doctor said: "Just because nothing has happened does not mean that we are not under greater scrutiny. We are all quite conscious of it.''

Britain's Muslim community has been unequivocal in its condemnation of the terror attack. At least the public rhetoric has been unusually robust and even leaders of the discredited Muslim Council of Britain, accused in the past of being "closet fundamentalists'', have been forced to take a public stand. In an unprecedented move, Muslim professionals from across Britain took out a full-page advertisement in The Guardian to denounce Islamist violence quoting a verse from the Quran: "Whoever kills an innocent soul, it is as if he killed the whole mankind, and whoever saves one, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind."

Meanwhile, to 9/11 and 7/7 have been added two more dates for the world to remember - 29/6 and 30/6 - when terrorism returned to Britain. Any illusion that the "war" on terror is succeeding should be laid to rest after what happened in London and Glasgow.