Australian police questioned four more Indian doctors in connection with the UK terror plots and have seized computers and other equipment during fresh raids. All have been released.
“The Western Australian Police executed a number of search warrants overnight and interviewed four men,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) said on Friday.
They have also seized computer and communications equipment for further forensic examination. “Officers are questioning other doctors to try to establish any connections with the attempted attacks in Glasgow and London,” Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty was quoted as saying by ABC news.
“I want to stress at this stage that nobody has been charged with any offence...,” he said.
Meanwhile, a media report said on Friday that the failed bombing plots in the UK were carried out with the blessings of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“It was an established fact from Day one that al-Qaeda was behind this and it was planned by its followers in Great Britain with bin Laden’s blessings,” The Times quoted a “foreign” intelligence source as saying.
British security officials were more guarded, saying it was too early to say whether the plot was masterminded by some foreign hand or hatched in Britain.
“The warning an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq delivered to Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working Baghdad, in April certainly suggested that he knew of the doctors plot,” the source said. An al-Qaeda leader reportedly told White, “Those who cure you will kill you.”
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Friday that investigators are close to “getting to the bottom” of the cell behind the failed attacks. “We want people to know that we have acted very quickly to deal with potential future incidents,” he told the BBC.
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