A doctor and an engineer drive to the Glasgow airport

John’s post on the overactive Swedish “youths” reminded me that I had been meaning to point out the report by the eminent New York Times reporter John Burns on the conviction of Bilal Abdulla for bombing Glasgow’s airport. Here are the first three paragraphs of Burns’s report:

LONDON — A terrorism trial centering on the use of a bomb-laden Jeep to crash into the main doors of Glasgow’s airport terminal on a Saturday afternoon in June 2007 ended on Tuesday with the conviction of a 29-year-old British doctor with family roots in Iraq who was one of the two men who mounted the attack.

A jury found the man, Bilal Abdulla, a passenger in the Jeep Cherokee, guilty of two charges of conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to cause explosions in a series of three bungled car bombings in Glasgow and London over a 24-hour period. The judge in the case, Sir Colin Crichton McKay, will sentence Dr. Abdulla on Wednesday. Both charges carry potential life sentences.

The Jeep driver, Kafeel Ahmed, a 28-year-old Indian-born doctoral candidate in engineering who assembled the bombs, died a month later of severe burns received in the airport attack, which failed when gasoline canisters did not ignite propane gas cylinders in the Jeep’s trunk.

What did the doctor and the engineer and another allegedly pacificistic Jordanian-born doctor who was acquitted have in common? Surely there’s a joke to be extracted from this report, but I think it will take Mark Steyn to perform the extraction.

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