Kafeel and Sabeel were in Jihadi movement - minister

BANGALORE: British terror suspects Kafeel Ahmed, his brother Sabeel and their cousin Mohammad Haneef were part of a 'Jihadi' movement and had made provocative speeches in India's IT capital, a senior minister said on Tuesday.

The disclosure, made in the Karnataka Assembly by state home minister M P Prakash, marks the first confirmation by the Karnataka government that the three highly qualified Bangalore men were involved in Jihadi activities in the state.

The Bangalore trio are the main suspects in last month's failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow.

Prakash's statement came as M K Narayanan, the National Security Adviser, told in New Delhi, "We are trying to get more details of the plot and the antecedents of the two brothers who have been detained."

Intelligence agencies in Bangalore are closely examining a computer hard disc taken from Kafeel Ahmed's Bangalore residence. They are being assisted by an Australian federal police agent and detectives from Britain's Scotland Yard.

Prakash made his remarks more than a week after British police detained Sabeel, a medical doctor, in Liverpool suspecting that it was his brother Kafeel who had crashed a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow airport terminal on June 30.

Kafeel is battling for his life in a Scottish hospital with 90 per cent burns while cousin Haneef is being held in Brisbane, Australia - caught while trying to leave for India on a one-way ticket ostensibly to see his new-born baby in Bangalore.

"These people have not got education from their own money. Tax payers' money has been spent on them by the state," Prakash told fellow-lawmakers.

Kafeel, who has a strong interest in aeronautical design, graduated in mechanical engineering from a college in Davanagere in central Karnataka while Sabeel and Haneef graduated from a medical college in Bangalore.

Police investigations so far have not thrown up any information on whether the trio had committed any cognisable offence in Bangalore or other parts of Karnataka

However, police are looking into the possibility that the main suspect in the UK plot, Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdullah, may have come into contact with the parents of the Ahmed brothers and may have visited Bangalore.

The parents, Maqbool Ahmed and Zakhia Ahmed - both doctors - had worked in Saudi Arabia for a long time. The couple, who stay in a middle class neighbourhood in Bangalore, have been questioned twice in the last week and a computer hard disc and several CDs taken away from their house.

The hard disc, said to have a huge memory of 320 giga bytes, has been sent to Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of neighbouring Kerala state, for decoding.

Prakash told the assembly that Kafeel had told his mother to keep the hard disc safe as it contained his "project" reports.

The minister said police were also investigating whether Kafeel, Sabeel and Haneef were linked to the attack on the Indian Institute of Science in the city in December 2005. That attack, the first terror strike in the IT capital, killed a retired professor from Delhi and is believed to have been carried out by the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).

Prakash said investigations so far have shown that the three had links with several organisations, but he declined to name them, saying "It is a sensitive matter and information cannot be leaked."