With the British Police charging Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah last night as a first suspect in the failed car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow, brothers Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed and cousin Mohammed Haneef are now the focus of a sprawling international investigation stretching from UK to Australia via Bangalore with an Iraq connection as well.

Bilal, who drove the Jeep Cherokee with Kafeel that fateful July 4 — he got down about half-a-kilometer from the Glasgow airport — is said to have been in Baghdad in 2003 during the US invasion. In fact, security agencies have confirmed to The Sunday Express that preliminary investigation has shown that the Bangalore brothers could have been indoctrinated into pan-Islamic fundamentalism soon after they came into contact with Bilal in Birmingham two years ago.

Bilal was born in the UK in a “prominent Sunni family,” when his father was studying medicine at a British university. He moved to Baghdad when he was two years old and returned to England in 2000 only to go back to Iraq where he got his medical degree in 2003.

Bilal, reports from UK say, claimed he was “angry and hurt” after his Sunni family “lost everything” in the Iraq war.

For the record, talking to The Sunday Express, National Security Advisor M K Narayanan said that all the two governments had exchanged were some addresses.

Although Bilal is thought to have travelled to Pakistan, none of the three Indians has visited either Pakistan or Afghanistan and none has come on the radar of Indian agencies in the past.

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