Two NHS doctors accused of planting car bombs in central London and Glasgow intended "murder on a terrible scale" and nothing else, a court heard yesterday.

Two NHS doctors accused of planting car bombs in central London and Glasgow intended "murder on a terrible scale" and nothing else, a court heard yesterday.

It was only through "fate and fortune" that hundreds of innocent people were spared death or serious injury in the planned terrorist outrages, jurors were told.

The homemade bombs had been carefully researched and sophisticatedly designed, but failed to go off because of a loose wire and too much fuel.

The plot was carried out by men "bent on revenge" for the wrongs of the Iraq war.

In his closing speech to the jury at Woolwich Crown Court, prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, said those involved intended murder on an indiscriminate and wholesale scale.

Mohammad Asha, 28, and Bilal Abdulla, 29, doctors working in hospitals in Stoke-on-Trent and Paisley respectively, are accused of planning the attacks with engineer Kafeel Ahmed, also 28.

Two car bombs packed with nails, gas canisters and petrol were placed outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, central London, and in nearby Cockspur Street, by Ahmed and Dr Abdulla on June 29 last year. But both failed to go off, the court has heard.

The next day the two men drove a Jeep Cherokee, filled with the same deadly mix of fuel and shrapnel, into the terminal doors of Glasgow Airport.

Again the bomb failed to go off, but Ahmed suffered severe burns which later killed him.

Mr Laidlaw told the court: "This was to be murder and nothing else and it was to be murder on a terrible scale for the British public, both in London and Glasgow.

"It was punishment in more general terms for all of us in this country because of the events in Iraq. It wasn't, of course, just a plan to commit damage to property or to set cars alight. That is not the method preferred by Islamic terrorists and organisations such as al Qaeda.

"These vehicle-borne devices were intended to kill and nothing else."

The court was told the men had planned a series of attacks, of which London was the first, targeting the people hated the most by extremists.

Jurors were told that the numbers of people that could have been killed in both attacks could not be estimated, but there was no doubt murder had been the goal.

Mr Laidlaw said: "These devices could easily have gone off and we suggest they were plainly designed to go off. But fate or fortune, call it what you will, intervened.

"Despite the wholly sophisticated design there appears to have been a loose connection in the London devices and the fuel-air ratio was too high for combustion to occur.

"In Glasgow, despite packing the Jeep with petrol, oil and gas, the canisters were too close together and were prevented from heating up to the point where they could explode. Had either exploded the consequences would have been truly terrible."

He added: "Lives, many lives, would have been lost. It perhaps doesn't help to speculate or to guess how many may have died. But there would have been deaths, would there not, and a large number of them."

Of Dr Asha, Mr Laidlaw said: "While he maybe an outstanding doctor, while he may be extremely well thought of, he is a man clothed with a religious fervour, committed and obligated to jihad. Not that of a bomber, but one that offers support to so-called martyrs."

He added: "It is inconceivable that this conduct between Abdulla and Asha, the meeting between the two men, lending money, the minding of important documents could all have occurred with Asha knowing nothing of Abdulla's activities."

The prosecutor said Dr Abdulla had given a "breathtakingly arrogant performance" in the witness box which "was insulting to everyone, to all of us that had to listen to it".

He then poured scorn on the Iraqi doctor's claims that he was only in the Jeep to get a lift to the airport to flee the country, branding it "laughable".

Dr Abdulla also claimed he threw petrol bombs from the car because they were given to him by Ahmed.

"This is completely nonsensical," said the prosecutor.

"It is almost reminiscent of a scene from Laurel and Hardy, were it not for the fact that there is nothing laughable about this all. These men were trying to kill passengers in the terminal."

Dr Asha, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire; and Dr Abdulla, of the Halls of Residence, Royal Alexandra Hospital, Paisley, deny conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause explosions likely to endanger life between January 1, 2006, and July 1, 2007.

The trial continues.