IndiaPost.com - Indians involved in uk terror attacks

NEW DELHI/LONDON: The pride of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that India with the second largest population of Muslims in the world did not have a single recruit to Al Qaida has been dented with the reports of the involvement of nearly half a dozen Indians - many of them doctors – in the foiled terror attacks in Glasgow and London.

Bangalore, so far known was for its IT exploits, has also the dubious distinction now of the first Al Qaeda connections. The suicide bomber of the foiled car bomb attack, Kafeel Ahmed, is a Bangalorean and the elder brother of Dr Sabeel Ahmed, a graduate of Dr B R Ambedkar College, who was detained last Sunday in Liverpool for his alleged involvement in the terror plot. Kafeel Ahmed has been identified as the driver of the Jeep Cherokee that rammed into the terminal building at the Glasgow airport last week.

He is in a hospital in Glasgow with 90 per cent burns. Kafeel is the eldest child of Dr Maqbool Ahmed and Dr Zakia, residents of Banashankari II Stage, Bangalore. He is a mechanical engineer and had graduated from the UBDT College, Davangere in 2000. He is working in the department of science and technology in Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

With his identification, it has become clear that three among the eight suspects, detained for interrogation are relatives and are from Bangalore. Two of them — Mohammed Haneef and Sabeel Ahmed are doctors and graduates from the B R Ambedkar College. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh offered British Prime Minister Gordon Brown cooperation in anti-terror investigation in the context of Indian doctors’ detention. But he had a word of caution against labeling any community or country merely on the basis of suspicion.

He cautioned against dubbing anybody or any country as a terrorist, saying if any community is targeted, it would create "new sets of grievances". "It is wrong to label any community or country. We have to look for solutions," Singh told a group of women journalists disclosing to them that he had talked to Brown and offered to help "in dealing with this" (situation arising out of the detention of Indian doctors) "If a particular community is targeted, it will create a new set of grievances," the Prime Minister said.

As investigations continue, more details are emerging on Kafeel Ahmed, the Indian national involved in the attempted attack at Glasgow airport. Kafeel - the elder brother of one of the other suspects, Sabeel Ahmed — was driving the flaming jeep which crashed into Glasgow airport. According to sources, in his last conversation with his family, Kafeel claimed to be working on a large scale confidential project, apparently on global warming. He had also told them that he would be inaccessible, even on phone and Internet, for about a week. He reiterated this when he called up home from Iceland on June 30, 2007.

Kafeel had also claimed that the work on his project would begin in the UK. He also told his family that an earlier presentation had failed and asked them to pray for him. Investigators are trying to decipher the meaning of these words. The suspect by ‘confidential project’, may have been referring to the terror plot. And ‘failed presentation’ could be interpreted to mean a foiled attack, say sources. As of now, the investigators claim to be puzzled by the slapdash nature of the plot, which triggered a top security alert but claimed no victims and left behind a series of clues. "My impression is that the Glasgow attackers only had a Plan A, and not a Plan B," Sergeant Torquil Campbell, a policeman who tackled one of the airport attackers, was quoted by news agency Reuters as saying.

The plan was to explode their vehicle and that they would go up with it." The British tabloid newspaper, The Mirror reported that four of the suspects met in the university town of Cambridge in 2005, suggesting the group might have been formed then.

A security source said investigators still had an open mind on the question of whether the suspects met, and become radicalized, before or after they arrived in Britain. Police, however, would not confirm a CNN report that they had found a suicide note in the wreckage of the jeep. Nonetheless, they have admitted to seizing the computers, which were used to plot the bombings. The police department is also suspecting the involvement of al-Qaeda’s Iraqi arm in the plot. They have hinted that there are indications that al-Qaeda’s inner circle knew of the attempted bombings before hand.