The Hindu : Front Page : Bangalore police follow cyber trail

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 10, 2007
ePaper

Front Page

Front Page

Bangalore police follow cyber trail

K.V. Subramanya and Sharath S. Srivatsa

C-DAC expertise sought to analyse hard disk

Photo: K.Gopinathan

Police Commissioner N. Achuta Rao (left) at a press meet in Bangalore on Monday. —

BANGALORE: The Bangalore police have sought the expertise of the Resource Centre for Cyber Forensics at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Thiruvananthapuram to decipher the contents of the high-capacity hard disk seized from the home of Kafeel Ahmed and his brother Sabeel Ahmed here. The two have been detained by the U.K. police in connection with last week’s Glasgow terror attack.

The police on Sunday sent the disk to Thiruvananthapuram as they felt the requisite expertise was not available at the Cyber Crime Police Station here, informed sources in the Karnataka police told The Hindu on Monday.

C-DAC, under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, provides advanced expertise in cyber security, signature verification and online fraud. The domain expertise comes from security and intelligence agencies, while C-DAC experts offer computing knowledge.

IISc attack probe

Bangalore Police Commissioner Neelam Achuta Rao told mediapersons on Monday that the information in the disk may help provide tips to the terror attack and whether it has Bangalore angle.

The Anti-Terrorist Cell seized the disk to ascertain if Kafeel was linked to the attack on the IISc on December 28, 2005, he said.

The seizure assumes significance in the wake of reports that Kafeel, when he was here for nearly six months before leaving for London on May 5, did a lot of online work on bomb-making.

Asked whether the British police, and the Australian police, who have detained Bangalore doctor Mohammed Haneef, would come here for investigations, Mr. Rao said he had not received any communication from them.

He said there was no material that could be disclosed. Several teams were working to ascertain if Kafeel and Sabeel had any links with terrorist groups in India in general and, Bangalore in particular. Their family members, friends and associates were being quizzed. Nobody had been arrested so far.

Some CDs were also seized from the Banashankari home, he said but refused to give details. The sources believe that they contained “jihadi” material. Mr. Rao and other senior police officers held a lengthy meeting with officials from the central intelligence agencies in the evening.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Front Page