LONDON — If the past is any guide, the investigation of the attempted car bombings in Britain will lead overseas to an Islamic network affiliated with Al Qaeda.
The question, investigators and experts say, is whether the trail of the would-be bombers will confirm fears that the threat from the war-torn Iraq region is escalating.
Previous plots, including the London transit bombings that killed 52 people two years ago, have been traced back through British terrorist cells to Pakistan-based leaders of Osama bin Laden's network. The alleged mastermind of a bomb plot foiled here in 2004 was an Iraqi explosives expert, now in U.S. custody, who shuttled between the core leadership in Pakistan and Al Qaeda's offshoot in Iraq, officials say.
In continental Europe, the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and aborted plots elsewhere had suspected ties to the sprawl of networks that send militants to fight in Iraq. However, the main Sunni Muslim militant organizations fighting in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Iraq and its allies, seemed embroiled in the war and did not show much capacity for operations far from home.
But the background of the apparent chief suspect, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, suggests a more direct connection: networks in the Iraq region that are linked to Al Qaeda and that select and dispatch operatives on a mission to Britain, experts say. Abdullah's medical credentials, British passport and suspected ties to Sunni fundamentalists in Iraq could make him an ideal leader for a plan to hit London with a taste of Baghdad-style carnage, experts say.
"This is exactly what a number of us in the intelligence world had been predicting," said David Omand, who served as Britain's security and intelligence coordinator until April 2005. "The concern was that Al Qaeda in Iraq would turn their minds to attacks outside Iraq. It's not really a strategic surprise. It looks like there's that connection to Iraq."
The analysis remains incomplete. Investigators need time to pursue leads in the Middle East, India and Australia. Five suspects are Arab medical professionals, and three are Indians, including Kafeel Ahmed, the driver of a Jeep that crashed into the Glasgow Airport in flames, leaving him severely burned.
Ahmed and his brother Sabeel, a doctor arrested in Liverpool, England, apparently were members of Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing sect that is nonviolent but often serves as a gateway to terrorism, said a police official in Bangalore who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Indian connection could point to South Asian extremist networks.
