‘Angry’ Iraq doc won over Bangalore brothers: investigators track the trail

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.

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.

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