Tuesday
3 Jul 2007
12 Al Qaeda Infiltrate British National Health System
By Annie Jacobsen in category The Al-Qaeda Threat
"Up to 12 members of Al Qaeda" have infiltrated the British National Health Service (NHS), reports the Daily Mail. The BBC has further details:
Terror suspects all linked to NHS
Eight people arrested in connection with failed car bombings in Glasgow and London all have links with the National Health Service, the BBC has learned.Seven are believed to be doctors or medical students, while one formerly worked as a laboratory technician.
Australian media have identified a man held in Brisbane as Dr Mohammed Haneef, 27, who formerly worked in Cheshire.
He was detained while trying to board a plane to India. A second doctor is also being interviewed in Australia.
Seven doctors or medical students have been arrested in England, Scotland and Australia in connection with the attacks. All worked in NHS hospitals.
Marwah Dana Asha, 27, who was arrested on the M6, is thought to have worked as a lab technician at an NHS hospital in Shrewsbury.
She was arrested with her husband, Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, who worked at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust.
In a separate article, the Daily Mail reports that Britain's National Heath System is an "open door to terrorists" with security checks for doctors who recently did their residency in Iraq involving nothing more than a photograph check. Further paving the way for jihad doctors is the fact that British immigration services reportedly relies on the "applicants' honesty to disclose criminal convictions."
An estimated 80,000 foreign doctors are working in the NHS, including 6,000 whotrained in the Middle East. Almost a third– 1,985 – were trained in Iraq, including Bilal Abdulla who qualified in Baghdad in 2004.
And another 184 came from Jordan, where Mohammad Asha trained – and 49 trained in Lebanon, his home countryseries of tests of their medical competence if they want to work at a British hospital.But the identity checks carried out by the General Medical Council are usually as simple as checking the photo on their passports.
And the immigration service relies heavily on applicants' honesty to disclose any criminal convictions.British employers are meant to check prospective workers' history with police in their home countries but experts questioned whether this would be possible in war-torn regions like Iraq.
Former Conservative homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer said officials had been 'naive' in assuming that professional people were unlikely to turn out to be Islamist terrorists.He said: "You might think that a highly-educated person like a doctor isn't going to be involved in radicalism but these events show that that is clearly not the case.
"It seems that too many have made this naive assumption. We have got to check every mother's son or we will get caught with our pants down once again."