On the afternoon of 30 June 2007, a dark green Jeep Cherokee was driven into the front of the terminal building at Glasgow airport. Security bollards stopped the car breaking through the doors. There was a series of small explosions but the blasts and the subsequent fire were contained within the Jeep. Five members of the public were slightly injured, some hurt tackling the terrorists. Police identified the two men apprehended at the scene as Bilal Abdullah, a British-born doctor of Iraqi descent working at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, and Kafeel Ahmed, also known as Khalid Ahmed, a Cambridge student. It was quickly established that the two men had been responsible for a failed bomb attack on London's West End a few days earlier. Ahmed died of his burns. Abdullah was sentenced to thirty-two years in prison.

The initial reaction to the airport attack was shock at what Scots took to be the latest atrocity in a sequence that started with the Twin Towers in 2001 and included the 2005 London tube bombings. But once it became clear that the sole fatality was one of the terrorists, the tone changed quite noticeably. John Smeaton, a baggage handler who weighed into the fight between a policeman and one of the terrorists, became a celebrity, not just for his prompt action in joining the fray and pulling clear an injured civilian, but also for his curt description of his actions: ‘So I ran straight towards the guy, we're all trying to get a kick in at him, take a boot to subdue the guy’.