Yes, you have to watch out for those youthful doctors, those known terrorists from around the globe.LONDON - They had diverse backgrounds, coming from countries around the globe, but all shared youth and worked in medicine. They also had a common goal, authorities suspect: to bring havoc and death to the heart of Britain.
There does certanly seem to be a common thread there. Wait, it's on the tip of my tongue...The eight people held Tuesday in the failed car bombing plot include one doctor from Iraq and two from India. There is a physician from Lebanon and a Jordanian doctor and his medical assistant wife. Another doctor and a medical student are thought to be from the Middle East.
All employees of the United Kingdom's National Health Service, some worked together as colleagues at hospitals in England and Scotland, and experts and officials say the evidence points to the plot being hatched after they met in Britain, rather than overseas.That's it! The NHS naturally incubated terrorism when it imports doctors from various nations!
What common ideology might that be? Hatred for socialized medicine?"To think that these guys were a sleeper cell and somehow were able to plan this operation from the different places they were, and then orchestrate being hired by the NHS so they could get to the UK, then get jobs in the same area — I think that's a planning impossibility," said Bob Ayres, a former U.S. intelligence officer now at London's Chatham House think tank.
"A much more likely scenario is they were here together, they discovered that they shared some common ideology, and then they decided to act on this while here in the UK," he said.
The third paragraph later parenthetically mentions a possible link to the previous London bombings, but hastily shows that these guys have little in common with those other people:
Damn, and it all looked so promising. But they can't possibly be related - the 2005 bombers, who happened to be Muslims, weren't in the medical field and didn't do well in school. These guys weren't born in Great Britain!British-born Muslims behind the bloody 2005 London transit bombings and others in thwarted plots here have been linked to terror training camps and foreign radicals in Pakistan, and the official said Pakistan, India and several other nations were asked to check possible links with the suspects in the latest attacks.
The educational achievements of the suspects in the car bomb attempts is in sharp contrast to the men that carried out the deadly July 7 transit bombings two years ago. The ringleader of that attack, Mohammed Siddique Khan, had a degree in business studies, but with low marks, and his three fellow suicide bombers had little or no higher education.
These guys are still a mystery. But with AP reporters on the case, I'm sure we'll figure out exactly what their shared ideology is, one day.
(h/t Boker Tov Boulder)
UPDATE: The Toronto Star is even more puzzled than AP:
LONDON–Were they sent to Britain with malicious intent, or did the will to wreak havoc come later? That is now the central question for Britain's counter-terror command as it works to unravel the botched weekend car bomb attempts in London and Scotland.
With six foreign doctors, one medical student and a former lab technician in custody after a four-day manhunt, investigators are quietly satisfied the "major suspects" in the case are in hand.
The probe now is shifting focus, as Scotland Yard works to pinpoint the genesis of the plot that fell apart bloodlessly in a surreal series of events that began early Friday.
All eight detainees have ties to Britain's National Health Service, overlapping in their duties at two hospitals in England and Scotland. Most also have roots elsewhere, but investigators have thus far found scant few common threads in their respective backgrounds in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, India and Saudi Arabia....
As the riddle unfolds, British media sources last night added conflicting reports, suggesting that one and possibly more of the suspects were known to police and also Britain's MI5 security service.