First suspect in court over Britain car bomb plot

An Iraqi-trained doctor appeared in a London court yesterday in connection with failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow.

Bilal Abdulla, 27, was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. Dressed in a white sweatshirt, he spoke only to confirm his name and address. No bail was applied for and he will reappear at London's Old Bailey criminal court on July 27.

Abdulla is the first person to be charged over the suspected Al-Qaeda-linked plot in which eight Middle Eastern and Indian medics have been arrested, seven in Britain and one in Australia.

Abdulla was arrested after a jeep crashed into the terminal building at Glasgow airport yesterday week. The father of another suspect, Kafeel Ahmed, 27, told the Times of India yesterday he had identified his son from television coverage.

Ahmed has been in hospital with critical burns since the Glasgow attack - witnesses say he set both himself and the crashed vehicles on fire.

"When we saw the footage of a person being carried to the hospital, followed by the blast and the police suspecting him to be the suicide bomber, we identified that he was our son," their father Maqbool Ahmed told the paper from Bangalore.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday that investigations were "getting to the bottom" of the cell behind the failed bombings.

Two car bombs primed to explode in London's bustling theatre and nightclub district were discovered the day before the Glasgow attack.

Although the London and Scottish attacks failed, they posed a test of nerve for Brown's new government in the first week after he replaced Tony Blair on June 27. For four days, security officials raised Britain's national threat warning to its highest level, before lowering it one notch on Wednesday.