The Herald - The Herald Magazine
‘These characters were trying to take people’s lives’ The Glasgow Airport attack remembered
When terrorism struck Scotland for the first time since Lockerbie, the attackers met with a spirited response ...
IT was the first day of the Scottish school holidays, and Glasgow Airport was crowded on the Saturday afternoon of June 30, 2007. Stephen Clarkson had arrived there, intent on picking up his brother, sister-in-law and niece on their arrival from holiday. “As I walked through the terminal, I noticed people being ushered out the way I’d come in,” he said in an interview in 2017. “I wasn’t sure what was going on – there was no panic – but I thought that if something had happened, I wasn’t leaving without my family.
“I carried on walking in the opposite direction to everyone else. By the time I got to the doors at the other end, I was on my own. I walked outside, and that’s when I saw a burning Jeep crashed into the building. There was a guy lying next to it engulfed in flames, a couple of police officers, and parts of the road were on fire, too.”
Nightmarish scenes had resulted when two Islamist extremists, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, 27, and 28-yearold engineer Kafeel Ahmed, had rammed a Cherokee Jeep into the terminal building. Only a concrete pillar prevented the vehicle from ploughing further inside and causing unimaginable horror.
The two men threw petrol bombs and fought with police and with passers-by before being overpowered. Abdulla was arrested. Ahmed, who doused himself in petrol and set himself alight at the scene, died from burns a month later.
Stephen Clarkson was one of a handful of brave onlookers who decided to take action. Speaking to the Guardian in 2017 he said a police officer used a fire extinguisher on the “burning guy”.
“I thought he was dead, and maybe they did, too. It was when he got up that I realised he was an attacker. It was eerie – he didn’t even groan as he stood; it was as if being on fire hadn’t affected him. I learned later he was on morphine. He tried to get to the Jeep’s boot – apparently, it was full of petrol bombs. The police were trying to stop him, but he kept kicking at their legs. As they fought, they moved towards me. One of the officers used pepper spray, and my eyes were streaming. The next time I opened them, this lunatic was coming in my direction.”
Clarkson continued: “When you’re involved in something like that, it’s hard to remember afterwards exactly how it went.
“You just act on instinct. My partner, Gillian, had recently passed away, after battling cancer. I had watched her fight like hell to survive, and these characters were trying to take people’s lives as if they meant nothing. It enraged me, as did having pepper spray in my eyes, to be honest. So I went for him.
“As soon as I hit him, I knew that he was going down. I don’t mean to sound blasé. He’d been doing these commando-style moves to fight off the police, and he seemed well trained, but I grew up in Glasgow: it seemed natural to me that a wee forearm smash would sort it out. I’m not a street fighter, but I know how to look after myself”.
Other people, including airport baggage-handler John Smeaton, taxi driver Alex McIlveen, and heating engineer Michael Kerr – also confronted the terrorists. (Clarkson, McIlveen, Kerr, Henry Lambie, Michael McDonald, Sergeant Torquil Campbell and PC Stewart Ferguson were presented with the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery at a ceremony in 2010. Smeaton had been presented with the Queen’s Gallantry Medal in 2008.)
Hundreds of passengers were left stranded in the rain outside the terminal building after the attack and others remained aboard aircraft on the apron. Marion MacKinnon, a BBC editor en route to Stornoway,
As soon as I hit him, I knew he was going down. He seemed well trained, but I grew up in Glasgow
told reporters that the evacuation from the terminal building had gone smoothly.
“We were upstairs in departures when the fire alarm went off and we were told that that we had to leave the building. We heard a lot of screaming and shouting from down below. People were running out from downstairs but upstairs things were quite calm until we saw smoke.” Western Isles Council convener Alex MacDonald was also trapped at the airport.
“I didn’t hear an explosion or anything else but we saw smoke as we left the building. We were sent out to stand in the rain about 200 feet from where the fire engines were still sending foam and water into the building.”
The Glasgow incident happened the day after two unexploded bombs, packed with more than 2,000 nails, petrol and gas canisters, were found in London, Abdulla and Ahmed having tried and failed to target latenight revellers.
The discovery of the bombs that Friday led Gordon Brown, who was then on just his third day as Prime Minister, to convene two meetings of COBRA, the government’s crisisresponse committee. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith went on TV to urge members of the public to remain vigilant and to warn of a “serious and sustained” threat. A third COBRA meeting was held at midday on the Saturday, three hours before the attack on Glasgow Airport. That night, Brown addressed the nation by television from Number 10 and declared that security at airports and other public places would be immediately tightened.
At a press conference, Strathclyde Police chief constable Willie Rae said: “This horrendous criminal act has been felt by everyone within all of our communities and it was planned to take place on one of the busiest holiday weekends of the year.”
As Brown recorded in his memoirs: “It was the first time Scotland had suffered a terrorist incident since the Lockerbie bombing of 1988. Although no lives had been lost, we immediately moved Britain to the highest state of security alert, ‘critical’, meaning a terrorist attack was expected ‘immediately’. It took four days until we were able to reduce the terror threat back to ‘severe’, meaning an attack is ‘likely’”.
Kafeel Ahmed died on August 2, having been transferred to the specialist burns unit at Glasgow Royal Infirmary from the Royal Alexandra Hospital, in Paisley – the same hospital where Abdulla had worked.
In December 2008, Bilal Abdulla was convicted after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court of conspiracy to murder and two charges of conspiring to cause explosions. He had been born in the UK but grew up in Baghdad and was angry about the invasion of Iraq.
Mr Justice Mackay, sentencing him to life in prison with a minimum term of 32 years, told him that he was a “religious extremist and a bigot” who held the most extreme form of
Islamist views.
The judge said: “Many people felt and still feel strong opposition to the invasion of Iraq. You do, you are sincere in that and you have strong reasons for holding that view. But you were born with intelligence and you were born into a privileged and wellto-do position in Iraq and you are a trained doctor.”
The judge said Abdulla’s radical religious and political beliefs meant he continued to be a danger to the British public. He said: “All of the evidence makes you a very dangerous man, you pose a high risk of serious harm to the British public in your present state of mind.
“That fact, plus the circumstances of the offences themselves, means that the only possible sentence on each of these two counts is a life sentence.”
Abdulla’s lawyer, Jim Sturman QC, said that his client had been “motivated by politics, not religion”.
“This is not a case where his intention was driven by religious faith but by his frustration with what he saw as an unjust war,” Sturman added.
Reporting the sentence, the Guardian said it had learned that Abdulla had been on an MI5 watchlist, possibly for as long as 13 months, before his car bomb campaign.
The paper added: “Whitehall officials said that MI5 held ‘tracers’ on Abdulla including information that proved helpful to police once he was identified as one of the bombers. The officials insisted there was no evidence available to them at the time to show he was plotting an attack.”