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.

Talking to a range of sources in the security agencies, The Sunday Express has been able to piece together the following:

• KAFEEL AHMED (27)

Passport Number: B-3533700.

The bomber on the failed suicide mission, Kafeel went to the UK in 2002 for his Master’s in engineering at Belfast and was in Northern Ireland until 2004. In 2005, he returned to Bangalore to take up a job, but soon left for the UK for a PhD in aerodynamics and aeronautical engineering at the Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge. During this period he lived in a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood in Birmingham where he met Bilal Abdullah through his younger brother Sabeel who was a colleague of the Iraqi doctor.

Investigators say 2005 could have been the tipping point for Kafeel. When he went to the UK in 2005, he had a goatee but when he returned to India, he had grown his beard and his family noticed he had become “more devout and puritan” about Islamic rituals and prayers.

Before he left Bangalore on May 5, 2007 for UK, he told his mother that he was going on a “secret assignment” to the North Pole to study global warming.

Kafeel, who spent several years of his childhood studying in the Indian Embassy school in Saudi Arabia, recently visited China and Singapore as well.

Kafeel showed preference to Tableeghi-e-Jamaat along with Sabeel but both are not known to be members of the organization.

• SABEEL AHMED (26)

Passport No: E-6016922.

Besides the fact that he introduced Bilal to Kafeel and was attracted towards pan-Islamic militant causes, nothing suspicious has been found about Sabeel. There is no evidence of any association with SIMI or other such Islamic organizations in India.

Sabeel, Billal and Mohamed Haneef were quite close. Being collegemates in B.R. Ambedkar Medical College, Sabeel and Haneef worked together for sometime in the Halton Hospital in Cheshire, England during 2005.

Sabeel gave his cellphone to Bilal, the one that Haneef had given him before leaving for Australia. It was he who introduced Kafeel to another doctor Mohammed Asha and wife Marwa Asha (both of Palestinian origin), both of whom have also been detained. Sabeel was in Bangalore last March in connection with his marriage.

• Mohammed Haneef, 27

Passport No: E-3903022.

Cousin of Kafeel, Haneef was one year senior to Sabeel graduating from BR Ambedkar Medical College in 2003. He had given his cellphone to Sabeel before leaving UK for Australia sometime in October 2006. Bilal subsequently used this cell to make several calls which are under the scanner for alleged links to terror groups.

Not much is known about Haneef who is currently being interrogated in Australia. Australian police have questioned — and released — four more doctors since his arrest and seized computers during raids. Investigators here are looking at the possibility of his association with an Islamic organization even when he was a medical student in Bangalore. It was Haneef who had told Bilal to take “any help he required” from Sabeel and Kafeel.