As British and US investigators track Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Rashid Rauf and his links to the plot to bomb US-bound airliners, officials here are taking a second, hard look at one man’s detailed interrogation reports: Jaish founder Maulana Masood Azhar, who spent five years in a Jammu prison before he was swapped for the IC-814 hostages in December 1999.

For, in those reports could lie many of the dots that British investigators are now trying to join: how Azhar boasted of his British links and admitted to having visited the UK in October 1992.

According to his statements to Indian investigators, Azhar travelled to Birmingham, Leicestershire and other UK towns—the same towns under the scanner now—delivering sermons and meeting young Muslims, largely second-generation Pakistanis. His visit was organized by one Mufti Ismail, an Indian-origin Gujarati Muslim. It was during his UK visit, sources said, that Azhar was introduced to a “passport forgerer,” who prepared a fake Portuguese passport for him, the one that he used to enter India two years later.

In a coincidence that’s now telling, the same year Azhar was in the UK, one Syed Omar Sheikh had enrolled himself in the London School of Economics. Seven years later, both walked free in Kandahar. Sheikh is today charged with the kidnapping and murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Azhar’s interrogation reports reveal that he was an avid BBC listener, spoke frequently about his growing support in Britain, especially among the youth. For a cleric who is the product of Karachi’s Binori Mosque, the same place from where Taliban’s Mullah Omar is said to have graduated, 38-year-old Azhar saw himself as a rising ideologue who commanded respect in the expanding pan-Islamic space.

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