New Opportunities in Terrorism: Fanatic Doctors

Two of the seven people arrested in the United Kingdom in connection with the weekend car-bomb attacks are doctors. Make that three of eight. Another arrest was reported while I was writing this.

SkyNews reports that one of the people in the flaming jeep that crashed through the front door of Glasgow's Blackpool airport the day before yesterday (Saturday, June 30, 2007) is Dr. Bilal Abdulla, a doctor at Royal Alexandra Hospital.

Another doctor, Dr. Mohammed Asha, was arrested on the M6 near Sandbach in Cheshire after British police raided his office.

As I wrote this, the arrest of a third doctor was reported.

Any one of these people may turn out to have nothing to do with the weekend effort to turn a nightclub and an airline terminal into infidel incinerators. It isn't easy to come up with an innocent explanation for Dr Abdulla being in Glasgow's rolling firebomb: at least not one that doesn't sound like it was made up by a defense lawyer from the States.

In fact, despite what British authorities have said, those car bombs may have been the work of misguided practical jokers or disgruntled soccer fans. That's not likely, though, judging from the way one of the Glasgow door-crashers kept shouting "Allah!" as authorities rescued him from the fire he set and the people who might have died with him.

However, assuming that the obvious explanation is the true one, at least one doctor is involved in the weekend's terror attacks. A doctor working as point man may bring the War on Terror to a whole new level.

To date, Islamic fanatics have blown people up, burned people alive, blown people up and incinerated the pieces, and, now and again, beheaded the odd infidel.

These are all brute-force methods of killing people.

Doctors have been connected with the War on Terror, or the War on the West, depending on your point of view, for years: Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Dr. Amin al-Haq, for example.

Now, with doctors willing to get up close and personal, we could see a new kind of terrorist attack. Not being a medical professional, I don't know what a doctor with evil intentions in a hospital could do.

I came up with something psychoactive in the staff water cooler, or death by medication after about a half-minute's thinking: and I'd guess that a real doctor could come up with something much worse.

As Sherlock Holmes said, "When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. ...we shall have horrors enough before the before the night is over ...." ("The Adventure of the Scarlet Band" (1892) p. 270 in "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" (Doubleday & Company))