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London: Two doctors went on trial on Thursday accused of being part of a group trying to murder people "wholesale" by carrying out car bomb attacks in central London and at a packed Scottish airport last year.
Iraqi Bilal Abdullah, 29, and Jordanian Mohammad Asha, 28, were part of a small group that tried to set off bombs outside a busy London nightclub and, when that failed, rammed a car into Glasgow Airport terminal in a dramatic suicide attack, the prosecution said.
The men wanted to punish the British people for their country's perceived persecution of Palestinian Muslims and those in Afghanistan and Iraq, the court in east London heard.
"These men were intent on committing murder on an indiscriminate and wholesale scale," prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw told the top security Woolwich Crown Court.
"Apart from the shocking nature of the activity these two defendants were engaged in, the extraordinary thing about this case is that both these defendants are doctors," he said.
Despite repeated attempts to set off the mobile phone detonators in the cars, neither vehicle exploded. The next day, the bombers drove a vehicle packed with fuel containers and gas canisters into the international terminal at Glasgow Airport on its busiest day of the year.
Both men deny conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions. The trial is due to last three months.
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