Police hunted Glasgow suspect before attack

By Peter Graff

GLASGOW (Reuters) - Scottish police were investigating a man suspected of attacking Glasgow airport on Saturday even before the incident in which a fuel-laden jeep slammed into a terminal building.

Police had been trying to trace the suspect via a property agency from which he had rented a house close to Glasgow.

Daniel Gardiner, the proprietor of the Let It rental agency, told Reuters an agency employee had returned home from shopping at 3 p.m. on Saturday -- some 15 minutes before the attack -- and found a note under his door from police.

The employee said police told him a telephone call from Let It had been made to a mobile phone discovered as part of investigations which began with two unexploded car bombs in London on Friday.

On Saturday, police arrested the passenger and badly-burned driver of a Jeep Cherokee who had rammed the vehicle into the entrance of Glasgow's airport, causing a huge fireball.

Police have linked the Glasgow incident to the discovery of car bombs in London last Friday filled with gas cylinders, petrol and nails. At least one of the bombs was to be detonated by a mobile phone which has been recovered by police.

Police have arrested seven people in the hunt for members of a suspected al Qaeda cell behind the three botched attacks.

Gardiner said the tenant who had rented the house was "a professional gentleman. There was nothing to distinguish them. They didn't have a tattoo on their foreheads saying 'Terrorist' or anything."

He said the agency had carried out a careful credit check before the tenancy began in April, and it had come up clean. The house is at 6, Neuk Crescent in Houston, near Glasgow.