ABSTRACT
On 2 May 2011, al-Qaeda officially announced that its new leader was the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. It was noted by many commentators at the time that the successor to Osama Bin Laden had an unusual CV for a terrorist mastermind: he was originally a trained physician and a qualified surgeon. Yet, al-Zawahiri was by no means the first example of the doctor-turned-terrorist in the organization’s history: the perpetrators of the failed London and Glasgow bombings of 2007 all turned out to be doctors, physicians, medical assistants or medical students. To recall some of the lurid headlines in the British tabloid press at the time, the suspected terrorists were ‘Doctors of Death,’ or ‘Docs of War’ practising ‘Deadly Medicine’. If many of the details of the planned attacks remain obscure, there is some evidence that the recruitment of medical practitioners was a deliberate new strategy in al-Qaeda’s ongoing war with the West. In a meeting with a British cleric Andrew White in Jordan a few months before the 2007 attacks, an anonymous al-Qaeda leader had prophetically warned: ‘Those who cure you will kill you’.1
