More charges filed in U.K. terror case

By Anand Giridharadas

Published: July 15, 2007

 

BANGALORE, India: A third man has been charged in Britain with a terrorism offense in the failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow, but on a minor charge that underscores the focus on the two other suspects.

The man, Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, arrested hours after a Jeep Cherokee allegedly driven by his older brother rammed into Glasgow’s main airport last month, was charged Saturday with withholding information that could have prevented a terrorist act.

A few hours earlier, the Australian authorities charged Ahmed’s cousin, Dr. Mohammed Haneef, with “providing resources” to a terrorist organization. He had given the SIM card from his mobile phone to Sabeel Ahmed about a year ago, when he was leaving Britain. Haneef faces 15 years in prison if convicted.

One of the major suspects in the thwarted attacks, Dr. Bilal Abdulla, was arrested after he emerged from the flaming wreckage of the Jeep that slammed into the Glasgow airport terminal on June 30. He was charged with conspiring to cause explosions.

The other main suspect, Kafeel Ahmed, 28, has not been charged because he is in critical condition from burns suffered in the attack. Doctors are doubtful that he will survive, but interviews with Indian investigators and relatives are beginning to offer a clearer picture of Ahmed as a disciplined, professional and rigorously religious young man who was helping to design airplane parts for the U.S. manufacturer Pratt & Whitney even as he grew more intent on defending Islam around the world.

 

Investigators continue to try to answer crucial questions about the Glasgow attack and the failed car bombs that were found in London, including who did the planning, where, and how many people were involved.

The interviews show that Kafeel Ahmed took a sharply more politicized turn in 2005, when he was living in Cambridge, England.

In February 2006, back in Bangalore, Ahmed convened a group of Muslims to mark what he called “Chechnya Day,” local police records show. Stories of Muslim suffering in that Russian republic enraged him, Indian investigators say, and he wanted local Muslims to widen their gaze beyond India and take up the struggle for Muslims everywhere.

At the same time, he was working for an outsourcing firm contracted to Pratt & Whitney, whose engines power much of the world’s commercial fleets as well as the F-16 fighter planes that have dropped bombs over Afghanistan and Iraq.

The seeds of a muscular, politicized Islam were sown early in Kafeel Ahmed’s life. He was born in 1979 into a world of relative privilege, as his parents were both doctors in Bangalore. In an era when Indians’ interactions with the world were limited, the Ahmeds moved to Iran for a brief time when Kafeel was young, returned to India, then moved again to the Saudi Arabian coastal city of Jidda for several years.

They moved back to Bangalore in the early 1990s, where the Ahmeds lived in a middle-class neighborhood. They were considered among the wealthiest and most respected Muslim families in a largely Hindu neighborhood.

One of Ahmed’s first cousins, a 35-year-old owner of a Bangalore clothing shop called Jeans Outpost, described the family as intensely religious compared with his own family. The cousin withheld his name.

Money was plentiful, but the family rarely went out to eat and kept no music system at home, the cousin said. Kafeel and his younger brother, Sabeel, never had girlfriends that the family knew of. The cousin said that it was well known in the family that Maqbool Ahmed, Kafeel’s father, was detained during the so-called Indian Emergency in the 1970s for belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, the Indian branch of a worldwide Islamist political movement deemed extremist by many Western observers.

D. Abdul Budan, an engineering professor who taught Kafeel Ahmed in his first year of college, described him as shy and brilliant. He always sat in the front of the class. He asked few questions, mingled little with his peers and skipped extracurricular activities. But he was pleasant, and his grades won him the fifth rank in a graduating class of 400.

According to the cousin, Ahmed spurned smoking, drinking and dating. He once criticized an imam as being un-Islamic for having hung Christmas lights at the local mosque, the police said the imam had told them.

Ahmed left India in 2001 to get a master’s degree at Queen’s University in Belfast. When he visited India in 2003, he had become more Westernized, his friends told police investigators.

Then he went to Cambridge. In 2004, Ahmed enrolled in a Ph.D program in fluid dynamics at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. By day, he studied. By night, he fell in with a crowd of young, smart radicals, said Shiraz Maher, a writer who knew him in Cambridge.

Maher, once a member of the radical group Hizb ut-Tahrir, recalled Ahmed befriending a young, British-born Iraqi doctor, Bilal Abdulla.

Ahmed, Abdulla and Maher all belonged to a group of men who socialized at the Islamic Academy in Cambridge. Maher has described the academy as a local hub for Hizb ut-Tahrir’s activities, a place for long conversations about U.S. imperialism, Iraq and the merits of jihadist attacks.

Sometime in 2005, Ahmed told colleagues at Anglia Ruskin that he had to move back to India to tend to his ailing father. When he returned, his Indian friends said, he had changed. His goatee had become a jaw-lining beard. Pan-Islamic issues – like the Chechen struggle – enraptured him.

He began to talk about doing something for the faith and “fighting for Islam,” said Gopal Hosur, a deputy police chief in Bangalore.

Jane Perlez contributed from London.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/15/news/terror.php?page=2

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