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Bomb plot suspect 'innocent'
02/07/2007 19:38 - (SA)
Amman - The father of a Jordanian doctor reportedly arrested by British police investigating three failed bombings said on Monday his son was devoted to becoming a surgeon and incapable of carrying out such attacks.
Mohammed Jamil Abdelkader Asha, the 27-year-old father of a small boy, could be the mastermind of the bomb plots, officials in Jordan said on condition of anonymity, adding that his wife Dana was also arrested.
British police have now detained seven people since a blazing car loaded with gas canisters ploughed into the door of the main terminal at Glasgow airport on Saturday following two failed car bombings in London on Friday.
Anti-terror officers arrested a man and a woman, believed to be Asha and his wife, on a motorway in northwest England on Saturday.
They are now being questioned in London, while Scottish police were on Monday searching North Staffordshire hospital, where Asha has offices.
Asha's father Jamil Abdelkader Asha said from his modest apartment in the working class suburb of al-Zuhur east of Amman that he had not been informed of his son's arrest and had learnt about it only through the media.
'A brilliant student'
"My son is incapable of such acts," said Jamil Asha, a former teacher aged in his 60s with eight children, showing off pictures of Mohammed.
"Mohammed is pious, like the rest of us, but certainly not an Islamist extremist."
Asked if Mohammed went to the mosque, Jamil replied: "He didn't have time for that, he studied all the time.
"He was a brilliant student. He wanted to become an excellent surgeon and was not the type to get involved in political issues, at university he wasn't even a member of any student unions."
Jamil called on Jordan's King Abdullah II to intervene with the British authorities, saying: "Not all Arabs are terrorists."
Palestinians make up about 50% of the 5.6 million population of Jordan, a generally stable country in the Middle East and a regional US ally.
Jamil Asha said his son obtained his medical degree in Jordan in 2004 after attending a school for gifted students in Amman, and the following year left for Britain to pursue his studies in his chosen field of neurology.
'It's a mistake'
"I cannot imagine he had any other goal than to realise his ambition by studying in Britain," he said.
He said he had last spoken to his son four days ago and that he had tried to call his mobile phone repeatedly since the reports of his arrest emerged, but in vain.
Jamil described the slightly-built bespectacled Mohammed, who married in 2004 and has a son aged two and a half, as a calm man who rarely got angry. "He had the head of an intellectual.
"My son was happy in Britain, he was always telling us. He didn't feel he was the brunt of any negative sentiment as an Arab or a Muslim, on the contrary."
"It's a mistake. The British are going to find out it's an error. Mohammed is innocent."
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