“We believe he was in India from sometime in early 2006. He returned to the UK in April 2007,” police sources in Bangalore said. The sources said Kafeel Ahmed was an engineer pursuing a Ph.D in computational fluid dynamics in the UK.

Dr Zakia Ahmed, Kafeel and Sabeel’s mother, confirmed that her elder son was pursuing a Ph.D but declined to say more. “He is pursuing a Ph.D, that is all I can say. I don’t want to speak about him,” she said.

An Internet jobs database for computational fluid dynamics experts, however, revealed a resume answering to the name Kafeel Ahmed with the e-mail id kingkaf@yahoo.com.

In the Internet resume last updated on March 5, 2005 Kafeel Ahmed is shown as a bachelor of mechanical engineering from India and an M.Phil degree holder in aeronautical engineering from the UK, with some work experience as research engineer in Belfast. He is shown as being in the UK from at least September 2003.

He is stated to have been residing in Cambridge, UK at the time and pursuing a Ph.D in fluid dynamics at the Anglia Polytechnic University. Apart from fluid dynamics, Kafeel’s stated interests include aerospace design and fluid-structure interaction.

An online 2005-06 report on faculty research at the Anglia Polytechnic University’s showed the presence of a post-graduate research student named Kafeel Ahmed at the Chelmsford campus of the college, researching a fluid dynamics topic ‘Computational Approach to Ink-jet Printing of Tactile Maps’.