Glasgow bomber gets 32-year jail term

LONDON: Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, who along with an Indian-born accomplice staged the Glasgow airport bombings in 2007, has been jailed for 32 years.

A jury at Woolwich Crown Court at the end of a nine-week trial on Tuesday found him guilty of conspiracy to murder and to cause explosions. The sentence was announced on Wednesday.

Justice Mackay told Abdulla he was "a religious extremist and a bigot" who held the most extreme form of Islamist views.

A jury at Woolwich Crown Court in London found 29-year-old Bilal Abdulla guilty of conspiring to murder and to cause explosions in the two separate attacks that rocked Britain just a few days after Prime Minister Gordon Brown came to power in June 2007.

An attempt to blow up a Mercedes car loaded with gas cylinders, petrol and nails outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London, packed with some 500 revellers,  June 29, 2007, failed owing to a loose connection on the mobile phone detonators, the court heard.

Just a day later a Jeep carrying a similarly deadly cargo was rammed into the main terminal of Glasgow airport, in Scotland, in an attempted suicide attack.

Bilal was co-passenger in the jeep driven by his friend, Indian doctor Kafeel Ahmed, who died from the severe burns he sustained in the attack.