According to the Times of London, a top foreign intelligence source says al Qaeda was in on the UK plot. The report further points to one suspect, Dr. Bilal Abdulla who was arrested while trying to bomb the airport in Glasgow, as the likely link (assuming there is a link). Abdulla evidently took a year off from his studies to travel to Pakistan (where al Qaeda has long trained terrorists) or Lebanon (where Hezbollah has long trained terrorists, including terrorists from al Qaeda). The Times reports:

The London and Glasgow bomb plots were carried out with the approval of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, a top foreign intelligence source said last night. “It was an established fact from Day 1 that al-Qaeda was behind this and it was planned by its followers in Great Britain with bin Laden’s blessing,” the source told The Times. British security officials were more guarded, saying that it was too early to say whether the plot was masterminded by some foreign hand or hatched in Britain. The warning an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq delivered to Canon Andrew White, a British cleric working in Baghdad, in April certainly suggested that he knew of the doctors’ plot. “Those who cure you will kill you,” the man said. The Times also learnt yesterday that Bilal Abdulla, 27, the Iraqi doctor who allegedly helped to drive a Jeep into the front of Glasgow airport last Saturday, disappeared for a year during his medical training in Baghdad. He is thought to have visited Pakistan or Lebanon. A friend who attended the Medical College of Baghdad University with Dr Abdulla told The Times that he was a religious fanatic, and that in 2001 or 2002 he mysteriously abandoned his studies for a year. “There was some talk that he went outside Iraq to develop his religious culture. I heard that he went to Lebanon or Pakistan,” the friend said.

The rest is here.