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Journalism of Courage
Kafeel Ahmed, an engineer from Bangalore who suffered severe burns when he allegedly mounted an Al-Qaeda attack on Glasgow airport, has died in hospital, British police said on Friday. However, his family in Bangalore is yet to accept the death of their son, especially in the absence of official word from either the British or the Indian authorities.
The Ahmeds’ lawyer, B T Venkatesh, said: “They (his parents Dr Maqbool and Zakia Ahmed) cannot say anything until clear information is provided to them by British or Indian authorities that the man in the Glasgow incident was their older son. Do the authorities want the elderly couple to come forward and claim the dead man as their own without official word? No one has contacted them.”
The family will wait for official confirmation on the identity before deciding on seeking the body of Kafeel Ahmed, Venkatesh said.
Bangalore police, however, say they have unofficial communication of a DNA match between Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed, who has been arrested in the terror plot. They say the Ahmeds have accepted that Sabeel is their son, therefore they are confident Kafeel is none other than his brother and the doctor-couple’s elder son.
Kafeel, 27, was one of the two occupants of a fuel-laden Jeep that rammed into the front door of the airport on June 30 and burst into flames. There were no casualties in the building. Kabeel, and his companion, Iraqi Abdullah Bilal, who did not sustain injuries, were arrested.
“We can confirm that the man seriously injured during the course of the incident at Glasgow airport … has died in Glasgow Royal Infirmary,” a police spokeswoman said.
Kafeel, who died late on Thursday, had been in hospital since June 30 with 90 percent burns. Police kept the engineer under armed guard at the hospital’s burns unit.
The day before the airport incident, two cars were found in central London with bombs packed with gas canisters, petrol and nails which failed to explode. At least one bomb was to have been detonated by a mobile phone which police recovered.
The government said the two incidents were part of an al-Qaeda plot and Britain’s security alert was raised to “critical”, its highest level, for several days.
Eight people were detained and three of them were later charged with planning terrorist attacks. Several of the suspects were doctors.
In Bangalore, the Ahmeds’ relatives say the family feels harassed by the media.
Said Kafeel’s uncle Sagheer Ahmed, who lives in the family’s native town in Hassan district, “I spoke to Kafeel’s sister Sadia and she asked us to pray for her brother. She said they were hoping it’s a case of mistaken identity.”
But a senior police officer said, “It’s the DNA match information passed on to us through unofficial channels that’s the basis of indentifying Kafeel as the brother of Sabeel — the children of the Ahmeds.”
Over the past month, since the United Kingdom terror incidents, Kafeel has been only circumstantially identified in India as the man who drove the burning jeep into Glasgow airport.
Initially, Kafeel’s mother acknowledged that her son Sabeel, a doctor, had been arrested in the Glasgow case, but said her elder son Kafeel was away in Iceland on a project on global warming.
She said Kafeel had called on June 30 asking for prayers and blessings as he set out on the project.
When Kafeel didn’t surface anywhere after the Glasgow incident, she told Bangalore police that TV images of the burning man in the attack resembled her son.
Meanwhile, British investigations determined that Kafeel was pursuing a PhD at the Anglia Polytechnic University’s Chelmsford campus, that he stayed in Cambridge, where he met the Iraqi man, Abdullah Bilal, who was arrested with him while fleeing from the burning jeep in Glasgow. During Kafeel’s postgraduation at Queens University, Belfast, he’d probably met Abbas Boutrab, an Al Qaeda operative, British investigators said.
Indian investigations found matches between e-mail identities used by Kafeel in the UK in 2005 and an identity used by him during his stay in Bangalore between October 2005 and May 2007, as well as a phone number registered in his father Dr Maqbool’s name and used by Kafeel.
Police in Bangalore believe that Kafeel, who held radical views even during his college days in Bangalore and engineering course in Davangere, was truly radicalised during his stay in the UK between September 2003 and late 2005.
