Role Of Foreign Doctors Draws Scrutiny In British Inquiry

LONDON, July 4 — Britain will conduct an urgent review of its methods for recruiting foreign doctors, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced today, after it emerged that all eight of the people detained in the aftermath of the failed car bombings here last week are from the medical profession.

Speaking in Parliament in his first appearance at the prime ministers weekly question time, Mr. Brown said the government would also expand its worldwide watch list of potential terrorists.

It is vitally important the message is sent out to the rest of the world that we will stand strong, steadfast, and united in the face of terror, said Mr. Brown, who was confronted with the terrorism plot within hours of his ascension to the prime ministers office last week.

His comments came as police appeared to have rounded up the main perpetrators in the plot to blow up two cars in central London and an attack on the Glasgow airport, in which two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee into the arrivals hall and set the vehicle ablaze.

Police are virtually certain they have arrested the main suspects, a police official said today, speaking on condition of anonymity. The police are now turning their attention to unraveling links and prior contacts within the circle of doctors who are from several Middle Eastern and South Asian countries.

The police official said that within a day or so he expected the authorities to reduce the terrorist threat level in Britain from critical — its highest level, meaning that a terrorism attack is imminent — to severe.

The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, said that the judgment on the threat level would be made by Britains Joint Terrorism Analysis Center. That is something that will be determined on the basis of intelligence, when it is the right time to do, she said, while on a visit to a housing estate in southeast London. That is obviously the way it should be.

The revelation that all eight people arrested following the bungled car bombings are from the medical profession has rattled a national heath service that has long relied on foreign doctors to fill its understaffed hospitals.

The seven men are physicians, according to a British police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, while the lone woman, the wife of one, is a laboratory technician. For the British public, the prospect of highly educated professionals as terror suspects is a chilling departure from the home-grown Muslim terrorists, many with family roots in Pakistan, who have been implicated in previous conspiracies here.

It may also prompt a debate over whether Britains health system should have tightened its regulations for hiring foreign doctors before last year, when it was possible for doctors to move here and practice without a work permit, provided they established their medical credentials.

Clearly, it will be debated, said Soroosh Firoozan, an Iranian-born cardiologist who practices near Oxford. There has already been a bit of a move to exclude foreign doctors from training in the U.K.

With Britain still jittery after the failed attacks, the police on Tuesday evacuated parts of Londons Heathrow Airport following a security scare, stranding hundreds of passengers in a rainstorm. They also carried out controlled explosions near a subway station here and outside a mosque in Glasgow.

The police on Tuesday arrested two more men on suspicion of terrorism after reports that canisters of gas were delivered to an industrial site in Blackburn, in northwest England. Officials would not say whether these arrests were linked to the incidents in London and Glasgow, in which gas canisters were also used.

Yet the most unsettling news may have been fresh details about the men linked to the plot to detonate two car-bombs in Londons West End, and the attack the following day in Glasgow.

The driver of the vehicle was another doctor, named Khalid Ahmed, according to an official with knowledge of the investigation. Footage of Dr. Ahmed after the incident, shown on British television on Tuesday, appeared to show a young man. He was severely burned in the fire, and is under guard in a hospital near Glasgow.

Reporting was contributed by Raymond Bonner, Alan Cowell, and Stephen Castle from London; Victoria Burnett and Ginger Thompson from Glasgow; and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

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