By Prasun Sonwalkar, IANS
London : Britain's medical community, including doctors and health professionals of Indian origin, is stunned by the arrest of at least five doctors allegedly linked to the attempted car bomb attacks here and Glasgow.
As investigations revealed how the suspects used the National Health Service (NHS) as a cover for their designs, the arrest of two Indian doctors has taken the Indian community here by surprise.
One Indian doctor was arrested in Liverpool while the other, who had moved to Australia from Liverpool, was held in Brisbane.
Overseas doctors constitute over one-third of NHS medical staff and have made invaluable contribution to NHS while working in training grades. In many general hospitals, more than two-thirds of junior doctors have trained overseas.
The identity of the arrested doctors has not been disclosed but reports say that they may include more doctors. Those arrested are predominantly of Middle Eastern nationalities.
Among those arrested is Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor who worked as a locum at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley. He was arrested at the Glasgow airport. Another doctor arrested is Mohammad Asha, a Jordanian national.
Some of the staff at the Royal Alexandra Hospital broke down while others reacted with stunned disbelief when they heard that one of their own had been arrested. A junior doctor, Abdulla had worked at the hospital after graduating from Baghdad University three years ago.
Abdullah's alleged accomplice, who received severe burns in the Glasgow airport car blaze, lay in the same hospital, seriously injured and receiving treatment from the staff who had previously worked alongside Abdullah.
Reports said that the arrest of the Bangalore-origin Indian doctor in Liverpool might have been a case of mistaken identity. The other Indian doctor arrested in Brisbane was on way to India, reports said.
The Muslim News, an online news outlet, reported that the Indian doctor arrested in Liverpool was a postgraduate trainee and may have been confused with another associate from Halton Hospital in Cheshire, who moved to Australia a year ago.
"I believe it may be a case of mistaken identity," one of his colleagues said, and added that he was convinced that his associate was at least "99 percent innocent".
He said the suspect, who began work at the hospital just under a year ago, was well known in the community as he had worked with him in various hospital and community projects.
The unnamed colleague believed he might have been detained because he had the mobile chip of the other doctor and was using his Internet account after he went to Australia.
The doctor, who reports said was 26, is understood to have been detained when he was travelling home from Penny Lane Mosque in Liverpool Saturday night.
The police raided the arrested Indian doctor's old and current addresses.
Overseas doctors, mainly from India and other parts of South Asia, have long been the source of recruitment to meet staff shortages in NHS. The migration of overseas doctors has been an important constituent of post-war migratory streams and NHS has become one of the sectors of the British economy most reliant on migrant labour.
In 1963, Conservative Health Minister Enoch Powell launched a campaign to recruit Indian doctors to save the NHS from an impending staffing crisis. By the mid-60s, more than 18,000 doctors had arrived in Britain.
The migration continued and it was only in 2006 that the government imposed restrictions on the recruitment of overseas doctors for training posts in view of the availability of a large number of British and European Union medical graduates.
The competence of overseas doctors has been widely acknowledged and valued, but it is the first time that they have been linked to alleged terrorist plots in Britain.
Security officials are said to be equally stunned at the emerging links since those arrested or detained had cleared all the necessary checks in order to gain employment or training posts in the NHS.