An Iraqi NHS doctor has been found guilty of conspiring to murder hundreds of people with car bomb attacks on London and Glasgow, but another doctor who worked in a Staffordshire hospital has been cleared.

Bilal Abdulla, 29, was convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of conspiracy to murder and to cause explosions. But a second defendant, his close friend, Jordanian NHS neurologist Mohammed Asha, 28, was acquitted of the same charges.

Abdulla worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, while Asha worked at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire.

Islamic extremist Abdulla plotted to murder late-night revellers in London's West End with two mobile phone-detonated devices. He drove one of two Mercedes saloons loaded with gas cylinders, petrol and nails into central London. But the bombs failed to detonate.

Just over a day later a Jeep loaded with a similar deadly cargo was crashed into Glasgow Airport in a suicide attack.

Abdulla wanted revenge for the wars in his homeland and what he saw as Western oppression of Muslims worldwide.

Abdulla plotted "indiscriminate and wholesale" murder with Indian PhD student Kafeel Ahmed in a wave of car bomb attacks.

Colleagues said Abdulla travelled to Britain to further his career at university and in hospital.  He was a junior doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, and also studied in Cambridge.

But secretly Abdulla was a member of a terrorist cell that wanted to plunge the UK back into the terror of July 2005.  He turned his attention from treating illness to planning a series of devastating car bombs in busy urban centres.

Abdulla and Ahmed, 28, cunningly concealed their tracks as they spent six months buying vehicles, renting a property and preparing the bombs.  They purchased five second-hand vehicles and had prepared detonators for at least two further bombs, experts found.

The discovery of two car bombs in Haymarket and adjoining Cockspur Street on June 29 last year sparked a nationwide manhunt.
Shortly after 1.30am, Abdulla parked one battered Mercedes outside Tiger Tiger, a nightclub packed with more than 500 people. Before walking off, the Iraqi turned on one of the gas cylinders and splashed petrol inside the vehicle.

Meanwhile his accomplice, Ahmed, parked and prepared a second similar vehicle at a nearby bus stop.  As the two men escaped on rickshaws they dialled the numbers of hand-made mobile-phone detonators left in the vehicles.

But the devices failed because of loose electrical connections and the smothering effect of the thick gas and petrol fumes.  This unexpected failure provoked the men to a desperate change of tactics as MI5 and counter terrorist police hunted them down.

The next day they made their way back to Glasgow, via a short meeting with Asha at his Stoke workplace. They spent the night preparing at their bomb factory, a rented family home at 6 Neuk Crescent, Houston, in Paisley, preparing a final suicide attack.

On Saturday June 30, Abdulla and Ahmed loaded a Jeep Cherokee four-wheel drive with gas canisters, petrol, nails and Molotov cocktails.  Their target was Glasgow Airport on its busiest day of the year with long queues as hundreds of passengers set off on summer holidays.

At exactly 3.13pm, Ahmed accelerated into the terminal building, impaling the vehicle on the edge of a door frame.  As they set fire to the vehicle, both men threw petrol bombs and fought violently with police and bystanders.

Ahmed doused himself with petrol and burst into flame, but was extinguished by police, sprayed with CS gas and arrested.  He died one month later from critical burns without ever regaining consciousness.