The Bangalore Bombers

The chilling story of how three Indian professionals plotted firebomb attacks along with other international Islamic radicals to cause mayhem and death in the UK

PICTURE SPEAK

FAILED ATTACK: Kafeel being overpowered by police at Glasgow airport

Just hours earlier, Kafeel had called his mother Dr Zakia Ahmed at their sprawling home in Banashankari, Bangalore, and asked her to pray for the success of an important project which concerned “global warming”. She, of course, had no idea it was one that meant ploughing a firebomb into passengers arriving into Scotland’s busiest airport. The details of the conspiracy are being uncovered as detectives and intelligence agents put together the story behind one of the most spectacular, if amateurish, terrorist attacks in the UK in many years.

KAFEEL AHMED: The Executionist How a brilliant aeronautical engineer from Bangalore became India’s first global jehadi THE PRODIGAL SON: Kafeel as a student; distraught parents Dr Maqbool and Dr Zakia Ahmed recently in Bangalore  EARLY LIFE Born in Bangalore in 1979 to Dr Maqbool and Dr Zakia Ahmed, physicians who worked in Iran and later Saudi Arabia. Schooled at the Indian Embassy School in Damam. Comes to Bangalore to study at the Aurobindo High School in Jayanagar between 1992 and 1994. Parents return for good to India in 1994 and settle at Banashankari in Bangalore. Studies at Bangalore National College until 1996. Ranks 5,711 in CET, secures admission to UBDT College of Engineering, Devangere. GROWING UP A RECLUSIVE KAFEEL: Posed for a group photo with classmates just once (left) before graduating in 2001; (inset) his project report on quality control Joins Devangere’s UBDT College (left) in 1996. Shy, sensitive but extremely bright and helpful. Doesn’t hang out with friends or live in the college hostel. Doesn’t seek scholarship despite scoring 80-90 per cent. Heads team of five students which submits a well-researched project report in 1999. Ranks fifth in the university with 87.5 per cent. TRANSFORMATION METAMORPHOSIS: Kafeel sported a goatee before leaving for Queen’s (above). On return (right), his beard was the manifestation of his hardline views Pursues M.Tech at Queen’s University, Belfast, in 2002. Active in student Islamic affairs. Returns to work briefly in Infotech, Bangalore in 2005-06. Is completely radicalised. Goes to Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge in 2005 for M.Phil. Meets Bilal and other co-conspirators.

There are now seven men and one woman linked to what has come to be known as “the doctors’ plot”. In fact, not all concerned were trained medical staff, but the name has stuck. It adequately communicates the ‘small group dynamics’ that bound the conspiracy together. Four clear links have emerged between its members: three suspects—Kafeel, Sabeel and Haneef—are from the same family; two were members of the Tablighi Jamaat, the avowedly non-violent Muslim missionary group; three lived in the British university city of Cambridge in recent years and almost certainly prayed at the same mosque; and all seven had worked at one time or another for the British National Health Service.

There was little reason to think the lanky, five-foot-seven-inch tall youth, now lying on the burns unit bed, could be the lynchpin of a failed mass-casualty attack. In fact, Kafeel seemed marked out to become a brilliant aeronautical engineer who would build aircraft that would jet in and out of Glasgow. He was the eldest son of Dr Maqbool and Dr Zakia Ahmed, medical practitioners who had moved from Saudi Arabia, where the children were schooled, to Bangalore in 1994. The father was involved with Jamaat-e-Islami and had a great influence on the boys. Although his mother is from Pakistan, Maqbool himself had lived in Nagenahalli in Karnataka for 40 years before moving to West Asia for work. The family lived in Iran from 1979 to 1983 and in Saudi Arabia for 10 years before heading to Bangalore, where the children were born—Zakia travelled to India each time to deliver Kafeel, Sabeel and Sadia Kauser.

Kafeel was the brightest of the three. He ranked 5,711 in the Common Entrance Test in 1996 and secured admission to the University BDT (UBDT) College of Engineering at Devangere, a textile town 280 km north of Bangalore. He was shy, reserved and kept to himself. An exceptional student who stood fifth in the university seven years ago having scored 87.15 per cent, Kafeel was extremely sensitive.

MOHAMMED HANEEF: The Doctor in Crime PLOTTER DOWN UNDER?: Haneef’s (left) mother Qurrathlain and sister Surayya at their home in Bangalore THE AUSSIE CONNECTION Born in 1981. Son of a school teacher from Mangalore. School topper, studies at Bangalore’s Ambedkar Medical College with his second cousin Sabeel Ahmed. Passes out in 2002. Takes up job in Halton Hospital in Cheshire. Moves to Brisbane, Australia, in 2006. In regular contact with Kafeel, Sabeel and other conspirators. Arrested by Australian police before boarding flight to Bangalore on one-way ticket. SABEEL AHMED: Brother in Arms SIBLING SYNDICATE WARNING SIGNAL: Sabeel Ahmed at the Ambedkar Medical College (top right); the Jamia Hazrat Tippu Mosque (right) which the Ahmed brothers wanted to radicalise; (far right) their house ‘Kauser’ Born in 1981. Younger brother of Kafeel. Completes schooling in Indian Embassy School Damam, Saudi Arabia. Enrolls in Ambedkar Medical College in 1998. Not a very bright student. Takes two extra years to complete the course by 2004. Goes to UK in 2004. Works at Halton Hospital, Cheshire, with Haneef in Liverpool where he is arrested. Visits brother in Cambridge.

“He was ragged in his first semester and was moved to tears even at the most simple questions like who he was and where he came from,” says Dr K.V. Arun, Kafeel’s senior by two years, and now a faculty member in the state’s Industrial Production Department. He never sought or received a scholarship though he consistently scored between 80 and 90 per cent. “He never went out of his way to approach anyone, unless it was something to do with studies. He was, however, friendly in the sense that if someone went to him for something, he always helped,” says Keshav Thakuria, 29, a student from Assam who sat next to Kafeel in class.

A loner, Kafeel chose to live as a paying guest in the home of Sher Ali Khan in a colony adjacent to the college, instead of the more usual college hostel, for the duration of his four-year course. He never hung out with his classmates. In the four years that Kafeel studied at UBDT, he never went out for a movie or a meal with his friends—he backed out of these outings on the pretext of visiting his parents in Bangalore. He was hardly ever spotted at the college canteen—a favourite student hangout, never participated in extracurricular activities, and posed for a picture only once, in a forum in the department of mechanical engineering. No one could fathom what was on his mind.

“He didn’t go out of his way to be friendly or to participate in any of the college activities; everyone seems to remember him only because he was brilliant in studies,” says Dr Abdul Budan, head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UBDT.

The only time Kafeel drew closer to his classmates was during the project work towards the end of 1999. He was part of a team of six students who had to prepare a project in their seventh semester, important not only for their marks but also to equip them with entrepreneurial and creative skills for the job market. The project, ‘Excelling Quality Through Testing, R&D and Training’, explained why Indian companies did not pay enough attention to quality control. As team leader and coordinator, he put a plan of action in place, doing everything from arranging permissions to collecting data on various firms in the city, helping the students with data collection on training and R&D, to acquainting them with the bus routes of Bangalore. The students, who worked together in two-member teams, met every evening for a month at one of the companies. A fiercely-focused Kafeel reviewed the day’s work and planned the next day.

“It was quite a time,” recalls Thakuria, who now works as a project leader with HP in Bangalore. Yet, there was an invisible line. The team members, all out-of-towners, were never invited to ‘Kauser’, the Ahmeds’ home. The team meetings were friendly, but strictly connected to studies. The project dwelt on survey data and results of quality control in India. “Indian companies must wake up to quality control in every field,” the report urged. “It was nicely researched and had an intelligent analysis and conclusion,” says project guide Professor Ramesh.

The project gave the classmates the only brief glimpse of the team leader who drifted away after graduation in 2000. He did not register to be part of the college’s globe-spanning alumni network. In 2001, Kafeel joined Queen’s University in Belfast to study aeronautical engineering for three years. His younger brother Sabeel, 26, an average student, was already studying medicine at the Ambedkar Medical College. He was joined by Haneef Mohammed, also 26, a second cousin of the Ahmeds. After graduating from medical school in 2004, Sabeel and Haneef worked in the UK, while Kafeel took up a research post at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge for a doctorate in computation fluid dynamics (CFD), a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical methods and algorithms to solve problems involving fluid flows.

Kafeel showed a keen interest in aerodynamic design, electronic maps and inkjet cartridges, producing a seminal paper on the latter subject, which earned him a lot of praise in the university’s annual report. He later joined a team of researchers in designing an inkjet to print a factile map for the blind.

In 2004, he shared a flat with an unnamed local activist from Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a radical group banned in Britain, who, in turn, introduced him to Bilal. This was the turning point and it was here that Kafeel came under the sway of Bilal’s radical Islamic bent. Bilal, who hailed from an elite Sunni Muslim family under the Saddam Hussein regime, was a devout follower of Wahhabi Islam. Soon, Kafeel began looking up to the Iraqi doctor who had moved to Cambridge in 2001. The duo became best friends. Sabeel and Haneef, who were working together at the Halton Hospital in Cheshire, made numerous trips to Cambridge. Kafeel introduced them to the genial Bilal and the four formed a social group. Sabeel and Bilal, in the words of an unnamed friend, “were like clowns, loud and funny, cracking jokes all the time”. Late last year, Haneef applied for and got a job with the Gold Coast Hospital, near Brisbane, Australia. Sabeel too applied, but was turned down for lack of experience. He stayed in the UK. Bilal, meanwhile, obtained a one-year post last August at the Inverclyde Royal Hospital in Greenock, Scotland.

Very little is known about Kafeel’s lifestyle, except that he attended the mosque every Friday. It was here, many believe that he came in contact with Mohammed Asha, the brilliant 26-year-old Jordanian Palestinian neurosurgeon. A friend from Cambridge said on condition of anonymity that Kafeel seemed pivoted towards a stricter interpretation of Islam by 2005. And he began talking to his friends—some sympathetic and some otherwise —about “fighting for Islam”.

Police have unearthed clues of these brothers who had begun professing a puritanical view of Islam by advising their friends to stay off television, save electricity and desist from revelry when they visited Bangalore. Two years ago, they tried to influence worshippers at the Jamia Hazrat Tippu Masjid opposite their home when they condemned as un-Islamic the lights that decorated the mosque. Masjid secretary Samiullah recalls, the authorities gently asking the brothers to desist from imposing their skewed views of Islam on the regulars.

BILAL ABDULLAH: Agent Provocateur GENIAL RADICAL Passenger of the Jeep that crashed into Glasgow airport. Qualified as a doctor in Baghdad. Professes extremist Islamic views. Brings Kafeel under his sway after meeting him in Cambridge. DOCTOR DOOM: Dr Asha with infant son Anas, mother-in-law Eslah and wife Marwa Da'na while in Amman, Jordan. MOHAMMED ASHA: Co-conspirator THE FAMILY MAN Jordanian neurosurgeon. In Cambridge at the same time as Bilal. Meets Ahmed brothers at a mosque in Cambridge. Worked at North Straffordshire Hospital before arrest by British police as a co-conspirator. PLAN A: Police tow away the Mercedes packed with firebombs in central London PLAN B: The flaming Jeep Cherokee at the Glasgow airport’s arrival terminal

Shiraz Maher—a writer who claims Kafeel was once a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir—says he knew him in Cambridge. According to him, the two met there and socialised at the Islamic Academy on Gilbert Road. He says he was shocked that Kafeel had such radical views. Jamal Iweida of the Belfast Islamic Center says he knew Kafeel well as a regular visitor and as a person who was active in student Islamic affairs at the Queen’s University. “If anything happened to his personality, it was after he left Belfast. He was involved in multi-faith events,” Iweida adds.

Kafeel worked from December 2005 to July 2006 as a senior aeronautical engineer for Infotech Enterprises, an Indian outsourcing company that designs aircraft parts for clients including Boeing and Airbus. By now, the radicalisation of Kafeel and Sabeel was complete and Kafeel returned to India with a traditional Muslim beard in place of his goatee. The shy and introvert youth was replaced by a fiery radical who spoke a lot about fighting for Islam as a jehadi. The brothers participated in a raucous protest march in Bangalore, just two months before the December 28, 2005 IISC attack, after a Danish daily published a caricature of Prophet Mohammed. Kafeel headed off to pursue his PhD at the Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge only last year.

The London bomb plot appears to have been developed in the three years that Kafeel had been in England after arriving from Northern Ireland. He also suspected of using his engineering skills to turn two Mercedes cars into the massive, if defective, firebombs which failed to go off in London in the small hours of June 30. And it was Kafeel who apparently brought together his younger brother Sabeel, who was arrested near the hospital where he worked as a doctor in Liverpool shortly after the events at Glasgow airport, and Asha, arrested along with his 27-year-old wife, Marwah, a Palestinian laboratory assistant.

It was apparently in the quiet university town of Cambridge that the plot came together. Many of the suspects frequented the Cambridge Mosque on Mawson Road and though the mosque itself is known as moderate and peaceable, it is possible that the conspirators may have come in contact with Hizb-ut-Tahrir. Maher, who is also a friend of Bilal, told the BBC that his friend, who was in Cambridge to study English, “supported the insurgency in Iraq”. Maher said, “He actively cheered the deaths of British and American troops in Iraq. One of his best friends had been killed by the Shia militia when he was at medical school. He was very angry about what was happening.”

The meetings in Cambridge are believed to have taken place in or around 2005. What happened over the next 18 months is still something of a mystery. Security services are investigating claims that several of the men attended “outward bound”-style camping and walking trips in Cumbria in the north-west England, in Scotland and possibly in Kent in the south-east.

Equally, several of the suspects were noticed by the security services after they made mobile phone calls abroad or accessed jehadi websites— though they were not put under surveillance. There have even been claims that one was facing disciplinary action for the amount of time he was spending on Islamic websites while at work.

Bilal’s colleagues at the Royal Alexandra Hospital were said to be deeply distressed by the news of the attacks. One doctor said the young medic was known for taking time off sick and was seen as a “bit of a slacker”. Early talk of an overseas ‘mastermind’ is now being downplayed although security services are checking reports from the US that Al Qaeda militants in Iraq may somehow be involved. A quarterly intelligence report prepared in April by the UK’s Joint Intelligence Analysis Centre said that there was “no indication” of a specific threat to Britain, though it warned there was evidence “that AQ-I (Al Qaeda in Iraq) networks are active in the UK”. It highlighted the determination of Abd al-Hadi, the man accused by US authorities of being Osama bin Laden’s emissary to Al Qaeda in Iraq, to launch a terrorist attack in the UK “ideally” before prime minister Tony Blair’s departure last month. Whether linked to an overseas ‘Mr Big’ or not, the conspirators stayed ‘below the radar’ until the very end, living very normal lives, going to football matches, travelling home for family occasions, having children and so on.

What had finally prompted the plotters into action is still unclear, but on June 13, Kafeel appears to have moved from the planning to the operational phase of the scheme. He drove to the Glasgow airport in a taxi, sitting in the front seat, but did not take a flight. It was clearly a final reconnaissance. A few days later he bought a secondhand jeep for £1,720 and parked it on a suburban road in Liverpool. Police are still trying to trace the purchase of the bomb cars that were to be positioned in London and to establish where exactly they were filled with gas and petrol and wired up to mobile phones.

On June 28, Kafeel and Bilal are believed to have driven the two vehicles from Glasgow to London. Then, having positioned them to be blown up in the city centre, one under the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, the two men returned to Glasgow, separately, in buses, taxis and trains. The two bombs were found on Friday morning. One when paramedics came to the aid of a drunk and noticed fumes pouring from one car, and the other when it was towed away by traffic wardens. The phones were meant to trigger a blast when they were called. The bombers called the car outside the nightclub twice and the one in Cockspur Street four times, but the bombs failed to detonate for technical reasons. Both the jeep bombers—Kafeel and Bilal—are believed to have driven the two car bombs into London. Once they failed to go off, they hurriedly planned the second operation so as not be seen as failures.

Convinced, rightly as it turned out, that the police were closing in, the plotters sought out the parked jeep, allegedly filled it with gas cans purchased from a local hardware store, and set out for the airport. The police located the cab company that had provided the taxi for the reconnaissance at two in the afternoon but it was too late. The Jeep Cherokee arrived at the airport at 3.15 p.m. Sergeant Torquil Campbell and Police Constable Stewart Ferguson were chatting quietly when they saw the vehicle approaching. Pouring flames, the jeep, after being blocked by security bollards, rammed into the airport’s façade. Ferguson later described how its driver—despite being engulfed in the blaze—had lunged towards him while Bilal had used his fists and feet to stop anyone from getting close to the vehicle. “I’ll never forget that burning man running towards me, lashing out,” Campbell, 49, told reporters.

By the time the passenger was subdued, the driver was “well ablaze —clothing, hair, skin—and from the attitude that he was in, lying on his back, there was a kind of resignation about him.” “I was free to act,” the policeman said, “so, knowing where the fire extinguishers were in the building, I grabbed one and just began to spray.” Within minutes, the two men were on the ground, under arrest. The Doctors’ Plot was over, but global investigations into the botched plan continue.

WHY DID THE BOMBS FAIL? PLAN A: Two cars packed with fire-bombs were left outside a night club. A syringe was connected to a battery and a mobile phone to activate the firebomb. Once the mobile is rung, an electrical circuit was to be completed, igniting the flammable liquid in the syringe. But despite multiple calls, the bombs failed to go off—most likely due to the faulty syringes. CELLPHONE Calling it activates the bomb’s crude detonator. SYRINGE Filled with inflammable liquid. Triggered off by an electrical current, it starts the fire to blast the cylinders. 9 VOLT BATTERY Sends an electrical current igniting the flammable liquid. NAILS Packed in cars as shrapnel to kill and maim. PLAN B Kafeel and Bilal filled an SUV with propane cylinders, set it on fire and drove it into the airport. The flames were doused before the cylinders could ‘cook off’ in the blaze.

Kafeel is believed to have burnt himself so as not to be arrested and complete his martyrdom. The original plan merely called for remotely detonating the car bombs and then returning to India—he had entrusted his parents with a cd which he would collect after completing the ‘project’. His suicide note describes the motive and grievances that led to the attack, but police have refused to reveal the contents yet. Just as the Australian police have yet to reveal the exact reasons for the arrest of Haneef in Australia two days after the Glasgow attack. He was arrested before he could board a flight on a one-way ticket to Bangalore. Haneef’s family in Bangalore insists he is paying the price of giving his mobile phone SIM card to Sabeel when he left Britain. But Australian police are reportedly in possession of tapes of Haneef discussing suicide bombings. National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan has meanwhile asked the Research and Analysis Wing and Intelligence Bureau to study the implications of the Bangalore bombers on India’s security. It is based on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s concern that the episode could not cast a shadow on Bangalore, dissuading the foreign investors flocking the city and affecting the IT personnel of Bangalore most sought after the world over.

Bangalore police, meanwhile, are awaiting an analysis of the hard disk and the cds of the 320-gb capacity computer retrieved from the home of the Ahmeds since they moved in from Saudi Arabia. The computer reported to have 12,000 files and 5,000 emails, besides speeches in praise of bin Laden and the jehadi movement is being examined by investigators. The Thiruvananthapuram-based Resource Centre for Cyber Forensics, part of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), is ferretting out details of Kafeel’s hard disc and a CD he gave his parents. The city police are trying to piece together the puzzle. Did the brothers set up sleeper cells in the city to fund missions and seek new recruits? Was Haneef a conduit in Australia for raising funds for the entire operation? Police are also looking for clues to the trio’s affiliation with fundamentalist Muslim bodies like the Indian Muslim Mohammedi Mujahideen.

The contents of the computer, investigators believe, could hold clues as to whether the brothers had anything to do with the attack on the IISC campus in 2005 or other terror activities in Bangalore. Clearly, the case of the Bangalore bombers will continue to throw up more questions than answers in the days to come.

-with Sandeep Unnithan, Stephen David and Aditi Khanna

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