Indian doctor detained from Liverpool identified: Reports

LONDON: The Indian doctor taken into custody in Liverpool on last Saturday in connection with the aborted car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow has been identified as Sabeel Ahmed from Bangalore, media reports said on Wednesday.

Both Ahmed and another Indian doctor detained in Australia, Mohammed Haneef, also from Bangalore, had worked together in Halton Hospital in Cheshire in 2005. Ahmed is still working there, the reports said.

However, a Metropolitan Police spokesman told they had taken into custody a 26-year-old man in Liverpool on Saturday but refused to give the identity.

Security experts are considering relaxing the official estimate of the terrorist threat to the UK from "critical" to "severe" even as six people taken into custody over the failed car bombings are being questioned at London's Paddington Green police station on Wednesday.

A seventh man, Khalid Ahmed, remains in hospital after the Glasgow attack. Haneef, being questioned in Australia, is the eighth man allegedly linked to the plot.

Others are Dr Mohammed Asha, apparently Saudi-born but Jordanian educated and a feted neurologist, considered the ring leader of the Al-Qaeda "sleeper cell" for the latest terror campaign against the UK transport and leisure assets, his wife Marwah; Dr Bilal Abdulla, an Iraqi who worked at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley; and two unnamed Saudi junior doctors also working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.