Bombing suspects include four doctors

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GLASGOW, Scotland — British police focused today on at least four physicians with roots outside Britain — including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket — in the investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London.

Separately, two men were arrested today in an industrial park in northwestern England under the Terrorism Act, but a statement from Lancashire police said it was "too early to confirm whether or not these arrests are linked to recent events in London and Glasgow."

At least four of the eight suspects directly tied to the terror investigation were identified as doctors from Iraq, Jordan and India. One of the doctors from India, 27-year-old Muhammad Haneef, was arrested at Brisbane's international airport, where he was trying to board a flight, the Australian attorney general said.

British newspapers and television reported that at least two persons detained Sunday in Scotland were physician trainees.

Mark Shone, a spokesman for Halton Hospital in England, said Dr. Haneef worked there in 2005 as a temporary doctor, coming in when needed. He also confirmed a 26-year-old man arrested in Liverpool late Saturday — also Indian — practiced at the hospital but he would not provide the man's name or more details.

Amid increased security at British airports and train stations and on city streets, a bomb disposal team carried out a controlled explosion today on a suspicious car parked outside a mosque in Glasgow.

Strathclyde Police Superintendent Stewart Daniels told the British Broadcasting Corp. there was "absolutely no specific information" of a threat from the vehicle but that it had been detonated as a precaution.

On Saturday, two men rammed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with gas cylinders into the terminal at Glasgow Airport, then set the vehicle on fire. On Friday, two car bombs failed to explode in central London.

Police also were investigating an attack on an Asian news agent early today in Glasgow, in which a car was rammed into the shop and caught fire or set ablaze, and the torching of a real estate office next to a mosque near Edinburgh on Monday.

Police have yet to establish whether either attack was racially motivated, but Osama Saeed, Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Association of Britain, said tension was increasing.