Doctors plotted "wholesale murder" in UK: prosecutor

By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - Two doctors went on trial on Thursday accused of being part of an Islamist cell trying to murder people "wholesale" 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 London nightclub and, when that failed, rammed a car into Glasgow Airport terminal in a dramatic suicide attack, 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 in east London heard.

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

"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."

Their plans failed only because, by a mixture of good luck and technical mistakes, the devices did not explode, he said.

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