What We Know About the Suspects Arrested In The UK
Two of the seven arrested after the foiled attacks in Scotland.
LONDON, July 2, 2007 — -- Information about the identities of the eight people arrested after this weekend's foiled attacks in the U.K. remains scarce. Here's what we know about two of them:
Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha
Asha, 26, moved to the U.K. in 2005. The al Arabiya network has reported that he is Palestinian in origin. But, according to Agence France Presse (AFP), he actually grew up in the al Zouhour neighborhood, east of Amman, Jordan. He is one of eight children.
In an interview with AFP, his father, Jamil Asha, an employee at the Jordanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described his son as a quiet boy with no interest in sports.
According to AFP, Asha attended the Jubilee School for gifted children where he proved to be a brilliant student, standing third in Jordan in his Tawjihi exams, the Jordanian equivalent of the SATs.
He continued on a scholarship to medical school in Amman, graduating from the University of Jordan in 2004, with hopes of becoming a neurologist.
That same year, according to AFP, he married his fiancee Dana, and started his medical internship at the University Hospital in Amman. Their son, Anas, was born in 2004.
Jamil Asha told AFP that his son and his wife moved to the U.K. in 2005, in order for him to pursue his speciality in neurology.
In an interview with AFP, Asha's father described his son as a pious man of faith, but so devoted to his studies that he rarely, if ever, went to a mosque.
He insisted that his son had little interest in politics and certainly not in Islamic extremism; he was not even a member of the student union at university.
"My son was happy in Great Britain," Jamil Asha told AFP. "He said this always to us."
"He did not resent the negative sentiment towards Arabs and Muslims," he said.
According to a Reuters report, Jamil Asha has now appealed to Jordan's King Abdullah to intervene in his son's case and have his name cleared.
Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla
Not much is known at the moment about Abdulla. According to BBC News, he is an Iraqi Kurd, who is registered to work in the U.K. till mid-August 2007.
He qualified as a doctor in Baghdad in 2004.