London Bombers Sped to Glasgow, Authorities Say

HOUSTON, Scotland, July 5 — British investigators have concluded that the two men who carried out an attack at Glasgow’s international airport last Saturday had sped there after a failed attempt to bomb a nightclub in central London, a British security official said Thursday.
And, for the first time, witnesses, a neighbor and the police have provided descriptions of the two men — Dr. Bilal Abdulla and Dr. Khalil Ahmed — saying they may have lived together intermittently in this placid neighborhood outside Glasgow and that a Jeep Cherokee similar to the one used to crash into an airport terminal was seen speeding around in the weeks before the botched bombings.
A week after the intended bombings in London and Glasgow — with the potential to kill scores of late-night revelers and travelers — law enforcement officials say that the evidence emerging is that the two doctors were the main operatives, if not the leaders, of a network of other medical professionals.
The manager of a local cab company said in an interview on Thursday that on two occasions over a five-week period from the end of May to the end of June a taxi picked up the two men together, suggesting that they could have been sharing a home here from time to time.
In one of those instances, according to Denis O’Donnell, the manager of the Paisley Cab Company, the taxi driver dropped off a man whom he now believes to be Dr. Ahmed at a local Asda supermarket, about halfway between the house Dr. Abdulla had been renting since April on Neuk Crescent here and the Royal Alexandra Hospital in nearby Paisley where he worked.
Much still remains unknown about the plot, including whether it was planned inside Britain, in Iraq or elsewhere. Altogether, eight suspects are in police custody in the case.
Charles MacPherson, 34, who lives in a development near the Nuek Crescent cul-de-sac where Dr. Abdulla rented his home, said Thursday that the neighborhood’s tranquillity recently was roiled by a speeding vehicle resembling the one used in the Glasgow attack.
“Someone has been driving this green Jeep at high speeds up and down the road,” he said. “It stands out because it’s the only Jeep in the area.”
A British security official, who spoke anonymously under government rules, said investigators now believed that Dr. Abdulla and Dr. Ahmed had also tried to set off two car bombs in London a day before the fiery airport attack in Glasgow.
In the early hours of last Friday, the police discovered a silver green Mercedes outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Haymarket. An ambulance crew saw what was thought to be smoke in the vehicle and called the police. A police officer removed a detonation device that used a cellphone, police officials said at the time. The Mercedes was packed with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.
A short time later, a second Mercedes laden with the same dangerous cargo was discovered in a “no parking” zone near Haymarket and towed away. Afterward, the police said that this vehicle, a navy blue Mercedes, had also been primed to explode but had failed to detonate.
An American visitor, Eric Wolff, who saw the blue car, wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times: “I just missed a 2:34 a.m. bus to Marylebone Road and ended up waiting until 3:34 for the next bus to arrive. I was standing at the bus stop in front of the blue Mercedes when it was towed.”
“The car was small and squarish, probably more than a few years old. The city came in with a ‘tow truck’ that lifted the car straight up with a crane mechanism and placed it on the truck bed,” Mr. Wolff wrote. “One of the tow guys took several pictures of the car with a digital camera as the car was being processed.”
As depicted by British security officials, the events unfolded after Dr. Abdulla and Dr. Ahmed drove the Mercedes down the 400 miles of highway from Glasgow to London, possibly on a route that led close to towns like Halton in Cheshire and Newcastle-Under-Lyme in Staffordshire, linked to other people believed to be associated with the alleged conspiracy.
But their plan went awry when the explosives failed to detonate for reasons that have not been made public. The two men returned to Glasgow and resolved to use the green Jeep Cherokee in an attack they might have rehearsed a few days earlier when they took a Paisley cab to Glasgow’s airport, according to the authorities.