The suspected Al Qaeda terrorists behind the attempted car bomb attacks on Britain were almost all foreign doctors. Five of the seven suspects held by police are young Middle Eastern men employed at British hospitals.

One is Mohammed Asha, 26, a “brilliant” neurosurgeon from Jordan. Another being questioned over both the London and Glasgow attacks is Bilal Abdulla , an Iraqi junior doctor who was a passenger in the car that rammed Glasgow airport.

Dr. Asha was a star student who chose to live and work in Britain because it treated people with “respect and dignity,” his family said yesterday.

Dr. Abdulla qualified as a doctor in Baghdad and started working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley. He arrived in Britain less than a year ago after training in the Iraqi capital from before the outset of war in 2003.

The driver of the Jeep Cherokee who suffered 90% burns after setting himself on fire in the attack — is said to be a locum doctor working at the Paisley hospital and is being treated there by his colleagues.

Two of his colleagues at the hospital were also arrested yesterday and another junior doctor is understood to have been the man police arrested in Liverpool. Disclosures of the suspected terrorists’ backgrounds surprised detectives and the intelligence services.

With Britain on its highest state of alert, unprecedented security measures were put in place at 900 sports grounds and shopping centers. The transport network is on full alert and concrete blocks are being put in place to protect Wimbledon and other high-profile targets.

Five men have been arrested, while a sixth, the Jeep driver, is under police guard in hospital. He was operated on yesterday, but doctors said his chances of survival were slim. He has not been officially arrested because detectives are waiting for him to recover and do not want to trigger the 28-day maximum time limit for detaining him as a terrorism suspect.

The seventh person arrested is Dr. Asha’s wife. Last night, an eighth was arrested abroad in connection with the plot, but police gave no details.

The suspects were tracked down through clues gathered from cell phones that were meant to act as a detonator in the London car bombs. The bombers called the phone in a Mercedes parked outside Tiger Tiger nightclub twice, and another in a car parked 200 yards away four times. The devices failed and detectives tracked the calls to identify suspects.

Dr. Asha and his wife were stopped by police on a freeway on Saturday in an operation involving up to 15 unmarked police cars. An alert had been put out on his vehicle, and it was clocked by Automatic Numberplate Recognition cameras as it headed north.

The focus of an ever-widening investigation yesterday centered on the Paisley hospital.

The men arrested yesterday, ages 25 and 28, lived in the block attached to the occupational health unit. Police said they were “not of Scottish origin” but refused to elaborate. The arrests were followed by a series of controlled explosions on a car in the hospital car park. Police were searching the building and grounds. Another car was blown up the day before and both vehicles are thought to belong to men who worked at the hospital.

Jamil Abdelqader Asha, 55, described his devastation at his son’s arrest. “This is just so strange, so unbelievable,” he said, as he sat shoeless in the modest four-story family home in the Jbel Azhour (Mount of Flowers) suburb of eastern Amman.

“My son cared about his studies and his family, but not politics. He was religious, yes, but not a fanatic. … It must all be a mistake, and I trust in the fairness of the British judiciary and security services, so this will be sorted out soon.