Glasgow suicide attack: Sabeel admits guilt, may soon be on his way home

Sabeel, 26, is the brother of Kafeel Ahmed who, police said, drove a burning jeep into the Glasgow airport terminal building on June 30 last year. Kafeel, who suffered 90 per cent burns, succumbed to his injuries weeks later.

Sabeel was today given an 18-month jail term after he pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey court here. But since he has already served half his sentence and agreed to leave Britain, he will be released from jail and deported back to India, Judge David Calvert-Smith said.

The doctor, who hails from Bangalore and studied at the Ambedkar Medical College, was arrested from Liverpool on June 30 last year.

Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw said Kafeel had sent his brother a text message before the Glasgow attack, directing him to an online e-mail account containing several documents. These included Kafeel’s will and instructions to Sabeel on how to frustrate and mislead investigators, he said.

Part of it read: “This is a project I was working on for some time now. Everything else was a lie and I hope you can forgive me for being such a good liar. It was necessary, just so that you know. Everything since last week was executed by me and my team. This is confidential on behalf of our ‘Emir’.”

When police searched the doctor’s Liverpool home, they found his brother’s laptop computer, which contained evidence that Sabeel had accessed the files.

Laidlaw said on June 30, after the attack in Glasgow, Sabeel came into possession of “significant information about the attack and those responsible for it... Thereafter he failed to make the required, or any, disclosure and he had, as his plea of guilty now demonstrates, no reasonable excuse for that failing.”

The information, which related principally to the identities of those likely to be involved in the bombing, would have been of “considerable assistance” to the police as they hunted the culprits behind the attack, he said. “At that time, when he was passed the information, the defendant could not have known, of...