LONDON - "Those who cure you are going to kill you." 
That, a British priest said Wednesday, was the cryptic warning made to him in 
Jordan by a purported al-Qaida chief months before the failed car bombings in 
London and Glasgow that have been linked to a group of foreign Muslims working 
as doctors in Britain. 
 
 
   Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown speaks in the House of 
 Commons, London, Wednesday, July 4, 2007, during Prime Minister's 
 Questions. [AP]
   | 
British authorities have said the 
attacks bore the hallmarks of an al-Qaida operation, but security officials say 
investigators are still trying to determine whether there was any direct link 
between the alleged plotters and an outside mastermind. 
Canon Andrew White, a senior Anglican priest who works in Baghdad, said he 
met the man privately with a translator and sheik after holding talks with Sunni 
Muslim tribal and religious leaders April 18 in the Jordanian capital, Amman. He 
meets regularly with extremists in an attempt to calm Iraq's sectarian violence. 
He said religious leaders told him the man was an al-Qaida leader who 
traveled from Syria to the meeting. The man, an educated Iraqi in his 40s and 
dressed in Western clothes, warned of attacks on Britain and the United States, 
White said. 
"It was like meeting the devil," he told The Associated Press in a telephone 
interview from Baghdad. "He talked of destroying Britain and the United States 
and then said, 'Those who cure you are going to kill you.'" 
White, who runs Baghdad's only Anglican parish and has been involved in 
several hostage negotiations in Iraq, said he did not understand the threat's 
significance at the time. He said he passed the general threat along to 
Britain's Foreign Office, but did not mention the comment that could be 
interpreted as hinting at the involvement of doctors in a terror plot. 
Then came the news that six physicians were among the eight suspects detained 
in the failed attacks in Britain. 
"As soon as I heard many of the suspects were doctors I remembered those 
words," he said. "I work with a lot of people who are not necessarily good 
people. It becomes very difficult to distinguish what threat is real and what is 
not." 
White said he gave the man's identity to the Foreign Office but would not say 
publicly what it was. He also said he gave the same details to American 
authorities in Baghdad. 
A spokesman for the Foreign Office, who spoke on condition of anonymity in 
line with government policy, denied White relayed the man's identify but 
confirmed he reported his meeting with the alleged al-Qaida leader. 
He also said that White did not pass on the reference alluding to medical 
practitioners and that because his information was vague it "didn't really merit 
further analysis." But White's report has now been given to British police in 
their investigation, the spokesman said. 
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, meanwhile, announced that Britain will increase 
its scrutiny of foreigners recruited for their skills, including doctors coming 
to work for the National Health Service, which employed all eight suspects in 
the failed car bombings. 
"We'll expand the background checks that have been done where there are 
highly skilled migrant workers coming into this country," Brown told the House 
of Commons in his first appearance at the weekly prime minister's questions. 
The government also lowered its terrorism threat level one step to "severe" 
from "critical" - the highest on a five-point scale. Officials said Tuesday that 
investigators believe the main plotters had been rounded up, though others on 
the periphery were being hunted. 
The reduction "does not mean the overall threat has gone away - there remains 
a serious and real threat against the United Kingdom and I would again ask that 
the public remain vigilant," Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said in a statement. 
A U.S.-based intelligence monitoring group said Wednesday that it obtained a 
copy of a video intended for posting on militant Internet sites in which 
al-Qaida's No. 2 leader urges Muslims to unite in a holy war against the West 
but doesn't mention the bombing attempts in Britain. 
It was not possible to determine from the transcript released by the group 
SITE whether the tape of Ayman al-Zawahri was recorded before the attacks. 
Several of the arrested men in the British plot were on a watch list compiled 
by the domestic intelligence agency MI5, a British government security official 
said, indicating their identities previously had been logged by agents. The 
official did not say why they were put on the watch list. 
"Some, but not all, have turned up in a check of the databases, but they are 
not linked to any previous incident," the security official said, speaking on 
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the material. 
The official said Britain's security services are watching about 1,600 people 
and have details logged about hundreds more. 
The Evening Standard said one suspect on the list had posted a comment on an 
Internet chat room condemning Danish cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad in 
a derogatory way. The newspaper, which cited unidentified intelligence sources 
for the information, did not say which suspect. 
The Times of London said one of the eight people in custody, Iraqi-born 
physician Bilal Abdulla, reportedly had links to radical Islamic groups and 
several others were linked to extremist radicals listed on the MI5 database. 
Abdulla was a passenger in the Jeep that smashed into Glasgow's airport. 
Investigators believe the same men who parked two explosives-laden Mercedes cars 
in London may have also driven the blazing SUV in Glasgow, officials say. 
Shiraz Maher, a former member of a radical Islamic group, said he knew 
Abdulla at Cambridge University. 
"He was certainly very angry about what was happening in Iraq. ... He 
supported the insurgency in Iraq. He actively cheered the deaths of British and 
American troops in Iraq," Maher told BBC television's "Newsnight." 
He said Abdulla berated a Muslim roommate for not being devout enough, 
showing him a beheading video and warning that could happen to him. Maher said 
Abdulla also claimed to have a number of videos of the then-leader of al-Qaida 
in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed by a U.S. airstrike last year. 
Abdulla had been disciplined by his employers at the Royal Alexandra 
Hospital, outside Glasgow, for spending too much time on the Internet, according 
to hospital staff, suggesting the plot may have been planned in cyberspace. 
Police seized several computers from hospitals in Glasgow, Stoke-on-Kent and 
Liverpool. 
British Broadcasting Corp., citing unidentified sources, said police in 
Scotland had identified a house rented by one of the suspects arrested in 
Glasgow as a potential bomb factory. Police could not comment on the report. 
While information held on the MI5 database did not alert authorities to the 
attacks, it did help police to round up suspects quickly, the government 
security official said. 
The eight suspects include one doctor from Iraq and two from India. Also in 
custody are 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, possibly Saudi Arabia. 
No one has yet been charged in the plot. 
The family of one suspect - Muhammad Haneef, a 27-year-old doctor from India 
arrested Monday in Australia - professed his innocence. Haneef worked in 2005 at 
Halton Hospital near Liverpool in northern England, hospital spokesman Mark 
Shone has said. 
"He is innocent," Qurat-ul-ain, Haneef's mother, told AP in the southern 
Indian city of Bangalore. 
Another Indian national arrested in Liverpool was Sabeel Ahmed, a 26-year-old 
doctor whose family in Bangalore said Wednesday that he was related to Haneef 
but did not say how. 
"Both these boys are just caught in between," his mother, Zakia Ahmed, who 
also is a doctor, said in front of her home in an upscale neighborhood about 7.5 
miles from Haneef's home.