Given that Osama’s number two is a surgeon, maybe we should take more care, says crispin black |
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It would appear that three of the men behind the weekend's bungled terror attacks were doctors of medicine, at least two of whom were working in Scotland. Indeed the car bombs discovered in London's West End were apparently driven from Scotland down to the capital. One hopes that they were better doctors than terrorists.
Arriving in this country as doctors provided excellent cover stories - 'deep cover' in the intelligence jargon. What better way to sneak into the UK?
It's a clever move by al-Qaeda's recruiters. Astoundingly, we now discover the checks on doctors from abroad allowed to work in the UK are confined to validating medical qualifications. Given that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's number two, is a trained surgeon, maybe we need to be a little more inquisitive about doctors who come here from the Middle East. |
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| It’s a huge relief that these terrorists are not British born and bred |
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By day, apparently, these men were assiduous in their professional duties. By night they were scheming Jihadist terrorists waiting for their moment to strike and kill hundreds of innocents, some of whom would have been their patients, as they flew off on their summer holidays from Glasgow airport.
And no one suspected a thing. Or at least that is what we are asked to believe.
It is a huge relief that these terrorists are not British born and bred. We do not have to go through the agonies of confronting 'the enemy within' as we did in the summer of 2005.
Although they fit in nicely with a long British tradition of murderous medical men - Drs Crippen and Shipman immediately spring to mind - crucially, these men are foreigners. Foreigners have to be granted permission to come here and have to pass through our border controls.
Because the July 2005 bombers were British, the debate about our lax border regime died down. Expect it to return with a vengeance.
FIRST POSTED JULY 3, 2007
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