TWO NHS doctors plotted “indiscriminate and wholesale” murder in a series of car bombings across Britain, a court was told today.

Bilal Abdulla, aged 28, and Newcastle resident Mohammed Asha, aged 29, were members of an Islamic terrorist cell, Woolwich Crown Court in London was told.

Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw QC said they wanted to kill the innocent and seize public attention around the world.

Mr Laidlaw said: “Their plan was to carry out a series of attacks on the public using bombs concealed in vehicles.

“No warnings were to be given and the cars were to be positioned in busy urban areas.

“In short, these men were intent on committing murder on an indiscriminate and a wholesale scale.

“In addition to the killing of the innocent, the objective of course was to seize public attention both here in this country and internationally.”

Mr Laidlaw was opening the prosecution against the two men accused of plotting car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow.

Iraqi-born Abdulla was arrested after a burning Jeep was driven into the main terminal building at Glasgow Airport on June 30 last year.

Jordanian Asha, a neurologist, was arrested on the M6 motorway in Sandbach later that day.

In the early hours of June 29, two Mercedes cars containing petrol, gas cylinders and nails were driven into London’s West End.

One was discovered outside the Tiger, Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, causing hundreds of revellers to be evacuated.

The second car, parked in adjoining Cockspur Street, was towed to a nearby car pound. It was made safe later that day.

Abdulla, of Houston, Glasgow, and Asha, who worked as a neurologist at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire, deny the offences.

Mr Laidlaw added: “Apart from the shocking nature of the activity these two defendants were engaged in, the extraordinary thing about this case is that both defendants are doctors."

Mr Laidlaw continued: "While here, as the evidence demonstrates, they turned their attention away from the treating of illness to the planning of murder.”

He said that material found in their possession after their arrests "reveals that both men hold or adhere to extreme Islamic belief and that both share, despite their professions and their obligations to save life and avert suffering, they both share the same extreme religious and murderous ideology as has inspired other terrorists who have struck at or threatened this country in recent years.”

The case continues.