IT is a quiet residential street in a rural village not far from the city, no different to many others across Scotland.
Yet it was at Neuk Crescent in Houston where Kafeel Ahmed and Bilal Abdullah established a bomb factory and laid their plans for mass murder.
In a rented semi-detached house near the main road, the engineer and the doctor constructed the bombs which they left in London and researched ways to deal death on a large scale.
Yet all this went on under the noses of their neighbours, with neither man attracting any undue attention. Airport hire car worker Kevin Land lives two doors from the house used by Ahmed and Abdullah, chosen for its proximity to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, where Abdullah worked, and, crucially, the airport..
Mr Land said: “I’ve lived here for 20 years and I remember both of them. But they kept their heads down and didn’t interact with anyone who lived nearby.
“We all had no idea whet they were up to. But I suppose they didn’t want to attract any attention. I remember the woman who lived on the other side of them and she said that she had encountered Ahmed one day when she was hanging up her washing, and that he had stared right through her. She said it was pretty chilling, in retrospect.”
Mr Land was working at Glasgow Airport on the day of the bombing, and was detained along with hundreds of others as the police launched their investigation. He finally got home in the early hours of the morning to find his street cordoned off by armed police.
Mr Land said: “The whole street was closed and there was basically a Swat team there. I saw marksmen in the woods behind the house.
“The police stayed here for months and set up a mobile incident room just outside.
“They completely tore the house apart on the inside, ripping up floorboards and pulling down walls. We used to joke that whoever moved in next was getting a completely new house.
“At the time it all seemed a bit unreal. Scotland is the last place you expected to see something like that, and Houston would be the last place in Scotland to harbour terrorists.”
He added: “You just don’t expect it to happen until it happens.”
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