Describing Sabeel as “easy going, calm person”, with multiple interests including travelling, Dr Zakia said he went to the UK in August 2004 to pursue further studies. “He was in his senior internship and looking to specialize in surgery. He liked to wander about. He recently travelled to Portugal to deliver a lecture,” she said.

According to Dr Zakia, the other doctor detained in Australia, Mohammed Haneef, was a good friend of her son and the families of the two were also closely associated. “We know them very well. They are good friends. It is the same thing that is happening to both of them,” Dr Zakia said. She said it was likely her son took his friend’s mobile phone after Haneef left the UK in 2006.

“We did not talk about the case, I didn’t ask him, I didn’t have the time,” she said.

Like Mohammed Haneef, Sabeel Ahmed also studied at the B R Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore, which is affiliated to the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences.

Sabeel joined the college on a merit seat after obtaining 73 per cent marks in his pre-university course in 1998, a year after Haneef. Unlike Haneef who performed meritoriously through medical college, Sabeel needed double attempts to clear the first three years of the course. He scored 55 per cent marks in his final year in 2003.

The family of Mohammed Haneef, meanwhile, remained deeply stressed at their sparse middle-class home in east Bangalore following reports of the extension of his detention in Australia by 48 hours.

... contd.