AMMAN (AFP) - One of the suspects arrested in Britain by police investigating three failed bomb attacks is a Jordanian doctor called Mohammed Jamil Abdelkader Asha, officials in Jordan said on Monday.
Asha, 27, who is of Palestinian origin and carries a Jordanian passport, could be the mastermind of the bomb plots, the officials said on condition of anonymity. They said his wife Dana was also arrested.
Seven people have now been detained 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.
Asha's father Jamil AbdelKader Asha told AFP he had not been informed of his son's arrest and had learnt about it only through the media. "My son is incapable of such acts," he said.
He called on Jordan's King Abdullah II to intervene with the British authorities, saying: "Not all Arabs are terrorists."
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.
"I cannot imagine he had any other goal than to realise his ambition by studying in Britain," he said, describing Mohammed as pious but not extremist.
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