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)

... contd.