The Hindu : Front Page : Glasgow bomber was Bangalore resident

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 06, 2007
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Glasgow bomber was Bangalore resident

Praveen Swami and Afshan Yasmeen

Kafeel is brother of doctor held in Liverpool

— Photo: V. Sreenivasa Murthy

The name plate and the letter box at the Bangalore residence of Kafeel Ahmed and his brother, Sabeel Ahmed.

NEW DELHI/BANGALORE: Investigators in the United Kingdom have confirmed that the driver of the vehicle used to hit the Glasgow airport on Saturday was Bangalore resident Kafeel Ahmed.

Mr. Ahmed set himself on fire after the fuel canister-laden Cherokee Jeep used for the attack crashed into barriers outside the airport. Doctors said Mr. Ahmed, now at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, was unlikely to survive his burn injuries.

A British national of Iraqi origin, Bilal Talal Abdullah, who sat in the passenger seat of the four-wheel drive vehicle, survived unhurt.

According to family sources, Mr. Ahmed last phoned his Bangalore-based family on Saturday, shortly before the Glasgow strike. In an earlier conversation, he told them that he was going to Iceland on research work pertaining to global warming, and would not be contactable for a few days. Investigators have now succeeded in establishing that Mr. Ahmed did not leave the U.K.

The first Indian national known to have participated in a suicide bombing outside the country, Mr. Ahmed is the brother of Sabeel Ahmed, a doctor from Bangalore arrested by the counter-terrorism police in Liverpool over the weekend. A doctor at the Warrington and Halton hospitals in Cheshire, Dr. Sabeel Ahmed was held after investigators found telephone calls linking him to the main figures in the bomb plot.

Mr. Ahmed studied engineering at the UBDT Engineering College in Davangere, Karnataka, during 1996-2000. He was studying for his Ph.D at the Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, U.K.

Police in Brisbane, Australia, arrested Mr. Ahmed’s cousin, Mohammad Haneef, as he attempted to board a flight to Bangalore via Kuala Lumpur. Dr. Haneef had worked in the U.K. with Dr. Sabeel Ahmed until last year, when he accepted a position at Brisbane’s Gold Coast Hospital and travelled to Australia on a skilled-worker visa issued by the Queensland Health Department.

All three are suspected to have been involved in abortive car bomb strikes in London. On Friday, two Mercedes Benz saloons fitted with petrol canisters, gas cylinders and nails were detected and defused after they failed to explode outside the Tiger-Tiger Club and on Cockspur Street in central London. After this, the group is thought to have decided on the suicide attack tactics used in Glasgow.

Motivation unknown

No clear account has so far emerged of the motivations of the Karnataka jihad cell, whose role in the campaign targeting London and Glasgow was reported by The Hindu. Intelligence sources said none of the three is known to have p articipated in activities of Islamist groups in Karnataka or outside prior to their departure for the U.K.

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