By IANS
Bangalore : Terror suspects Kafeel Ahmed, his brother Sabeel and their cousin Mohammad Haneef were part of a jihadi movement and had made provocative speeches in this IT capital of India, a senior minister said Tuesday as investigators began to piece together a profile of the Bangalore trio.
After days of speculation and rumours, there was confirmed news about the men's background including the fact that Kafeel worked for a high-profile BPO firm here.
The disclosure about their jihadi background was made in the Karnataka assembly by state Home Minister M.P. Prakash – the first confirmation by the state government that the three highly qualified men were involved in terrorist activities in the state.
The Bangalore trio are the main suspects in last month's failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow.
Prakash's statement came as National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan told IANS in New Delhi: "We are trying to get more details of the plot and the antecedents of the two brothers who have been detained."
Kafeel, a mechanical engineer, was employed for a short period of about seven months with Infotech Enterprises, which has an office in the upmarket area of Koramangala here.
"He was with us between December 2005 and July 2006," K.S. Susindar, the company's spokesperson, told reporters. Susindar said he was not in a position to give details of the work that Kafeel had done during those seven months.
Intelligence agencies in Bangalore are now closely examining a computer hard disc taken from Kafeel's residence here.
A senior police officer here said Australian and British police officials were yet to reach Bangalore to join the probe.
"No. Nobody has come," the officer told IANS reacting to reports that investigators from the two countries had arrived.
Asked whether they are expected Wednesday and whether they are in New Delhi and in touch with the Bangalore police, the officer said he could not confirm if they are in the national capital.
A week ago, British police detained Sabeel, a medical doctor, in Liverpool suspecting that it was his brother Kafeel who had crashed a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow airport terminal on June 30.
Kafeel is battling for his life in a Scottish hospital with 90 percent burns while cousin Haneef is being held in Brisbane, Australia – caught while trying to leave for India on a one-way ticket ostensibly to see his new-born baby in Bangalore.
"These people have not got education from their own money. Taxpayers' money has been spent on them by the state," Prakash told fellow lawmakers.
Police investigations so far have not thrown up any information on whether the trio had committed any cognisable offence in Bangalore or other parts of Karnataka.
However, police are looking into the possibility that the main suspect in the UK plot, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, may have come into contact with the parents of the Ahmed brothers and may have visited Bangalore.
The parents, Maqbool Ahmed and Zakhia Ahmed – both doctors – had worked in Saudi Arabia for a long time. The couple, who stay in a middle class neighbourhood here, have been questioned twice in the last week and a computer hard disc and several CDs taken away from their house.
The hard disc, said to have a memory of 320 gigabytes, has been sent to a Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) unit in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of neighbouring Kerala state, for decoding.
Prakash told the assembly that Kafeel had told his mother to keep the hard disc safe as it contained his "project" reports.
The minister said police were also investigating whether Kafeel, Sabeel and Haneef were linked to the attack on the Indian Institute of Science in the city in December 2005. That attack, the first terror strike in the IT capital, killed a retired professor from Delhi and is believed to have been carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
Prakash said investigations so far have shown that the three had links with several organisations, but he declined to name them, saying "It is a sensitive matter and information cannot be leaked."