8/08/2007 07:20:00 pm 0 Comments

IT = International Terror

All it needed was a flaming jeep and a night to transform Bangalore

from a hub of outsourcing industry, malls and pubs

to a new epicenter of

'doctor terrorists'

who could violently wake up the world with a prescription

of shock and death.

It also showed that anything could be outsourced to Bangalore

from mundane railway timings and number-crunching credit card

info to a new fiery brand of terrorism.

And with the Glasgow incident where three city lads tried to

inject terror and rock the world,

Bangalore wears the D

r Jekyll and Mr Hyde cap

perfectly.

http://dgfun.blogspot.com
In the upmarket areas where malls and multiplexes jostle

to attract footfalls and the IT crowd, Bangalore wears a suave and sophisticated image;

in heavily glassed office complexes,

the city has its IT muscle to flaunt; and at dusk,

the pub-swinging partying crowd wake up to freeze the city's night image.

Somewhere amidst all this, Bangalore now seems to have shady areas

where terrorism is cooked and served across the globe.

It is in these unknown nooks far from the mall culture

that the two brothers

Khafeel Ahmed and Dr Sabeel Ahmed —

and their relative

Dr Haneef,

possibly, made the blueprint of the London-Glasgow terror plot.

What has shocked the city is that these boys

who were till yesterday essentially Bangaloreans

who studied and grew up in neighbourhoods

that could never be associated with terrorism.

For example,

Dr Sabeel's house is in Banasankari,

a locality that has been predominantly a upper middle class enclave.

The house has the name of Kafeel too.

Dr Haneef stays in Tannery Road, again, in the heart of the city.

While Khafeel studied in the rich cotton town of Davangere

for his engineering degree and went on to study for

a doctorate in computational fluid dynamics in the UK,

Sabeel and Haneef earned their medical degrees from the

B R Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore.

All of them were

`good students'

according to the professors

who taught them and friends who knew the trio.

So the question that Bangalore is desperately asking itself

is how these students who could have done the city proud

decided to take the path of violence, hatred and terrorism.

And the answer is not difficult to find:

they were systematically indoctrinated.

Sources say that this transformation process could never have been

an overnight job and the three have left their

"signatures and fingerprints"

of their plan through a series of commissions and omissions.

One theory is that radical students who came from West Asia

got in touch with local students like Kafeel and Sabeel

in their fight against

'infidels'.

The other is that radical agencies did body shopping

in soft cities like Bangalore to recruit 'fighters' from the well-educated .

But the seeds of violence may have been nurtured early on

when Kafeel's father Dr Maqbool Ahamed worked in the

radically strong West Asia hotspots and came under the influence

of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

A highly orthodox man, Maqbool could have passed on his belief

s to his two sons (see family tree).

The Jamaat seems to have found

Kafeel and Sabeel

as their ideal men to run their sleeper terror cells

because of their educational background,

strong beliefs and with no previous stains of terror blood on their hands.

And

just behind the Jammat the al-Qaeda

too seems to have pitched in.

The high-capacity hard disc (320 GB) seized

from Kafeel's house seems to have all the big names

of the al-Qaeda and thousands of email for the police

to get at the bigger picture of the terror network

that was built right under the nose of the law in Bangalore.

"Well educated people who go on wrong paths are very dangerous.

It would be very difficult to suspect them as they not only

look sober but also intelligent and courteous."

Added to all this was the fact that Bangalore was a safe haven for

'sleeper cells'

of terrorist outfits.


But

Chief Minister H D Kumaraswamy

believes that the latest incident that has pitchforked the city

into the terror map has not affected the image of Brand Bangalore.

"These are small dents,"

he says, that come naturally when a city grows from

a local image to an international name to reckon with.

"The city's reputation is safe,"

he assures despite Bangalore getting a bloody

nose globally for its links with terrorism.

It is sometimes such attitude to sweep everything under

the carpet that results in a lax in security.

It is not as if there were no warnings.

Not just the Karnataka government,

but the Central Government too had been cautioned as early as 1993

by the Israeli authorities that South India,

especially Bangalore, was attracting radical students from West Asia,

who had the potential of becoming terrorists.
http://dgfun.blogspot.com
This followed the arrest of a Palestinian student

who had come from Bangalore in 1993.

The Israelis had even offered the Indians a chance to interrogate

the Palestinian and obtain more information,

but the Indian government desisted from doing so.

Strangely, the government looked the other way.

When a suggestion was made to profile students coming from abroad,

especially West Asia, the government went into a tizzy.

Obviously there was a vote bank to cater to.

Sources say that even the Egyptian authorities

had cautioned India that
radical students

who were denied admission in Arab universities

had easily managed to get entry into Indian universities.

The government was just not interested in checking

their extremist background.

It was here that radical outfits set up their

'outsourcing offices'.

The police clearly failed to catch these signals in the air

and the Glasgow incident has shown how weak or non-existent

the intelligence set-up in Karnataka is.

The 'sleeper terrorists cells' obviously escaped the porous

net of the intelligence wings. While it was known that terrorism

had a global span especially after the Iraqi incursions,

the Bangalore police miserably failed to take steps to keep

a tab on terrorists in the making. While they may have got a bigger picture,

the little pockets of terror planning went unnoticed.

The Central intelligence agencies that keep a watch on exchange

of information through cyberspace too did not catch

anything despite so many straws in the wind.

Bangalore has also been providing an umbrella for organisations across

the South that have radical leanings,

political ambitions and an eye for consolidation of power on religious lines.

The spawning of madrasas in the coastal belt

has also resulted in producing highly radicalised youths.

And this is where Bangalore and Karnataka are going

to face a problem. Parties like the

Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular)

are not ready to go the whole mile in supporting stern

action against radical outfits for fear of losing a major chunk of their vote bank.
http://dgfun.blogspot.com
For example,

Karnataka had set up an Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS)

a few years ago to specifically snoop for terrorist activities of the

Kafeel-Shabeel type.

But the ATS hardly functioned and the lack of seriousness

of the government can be gauged from the fact that

the outfit turned out to be a place to post officials who
were not favoured by the government.

The ATS, when first formed,

was supposed to work in close association with th

e intelligence wing of the State police.

But the wing itself has become just a reception centre for all the

alerts sent by the Centre on the possible terror activities

as they don't have basic operational logistics to gather information.

Even today, the police in Bangalore are clueless on the terrorists

who stormed the placid campus of the Indian Institute of Science

(IISc) on December 28, 2005.

That should give anyone an idea of the

intelligence network operational in Bangalore.

Intelligence gathering set-up lacks trained men and the latest gadgets.

Now Karnataka seems to have woken up

and the ATS hopefully will get more muscle and teeth.

So it is hardly surprising that Kafeel and Sabeel went unnoticed.

But the bigger question that Bangalore

is asking is whether the parents had a whiff of the terror plot.

Though they did not have the complete picture,

they knew that something was cooking.

Why did they not step in?

Ahmed's Family

Maqbool Ahmed, Father
Graduated from Bangalore Medical College (BMC)

and worked as a professor in BMC

and also ran a nursing home in BTM Layout

called Nobel Nursing Home.

Apparently, he was a active member of Jamaat-e-Islami.

He has been suffering from Alzheimer's for the past seven years.

Zakia Ahmed, Mother
An MBBS from Bangalore Medical College.

She was a also working as a professor at BMC

and also helped her husband run the nursing home.

The couple were in Iran for three or four years

before they moved to Saudi Arabia in 1983,

where they worked in a hospital.

They returned to the city in 1994.

Khafeel Ahmed, first son
The guy who apparently drove the blazing jeep

into the Glasgow airport and also designed the car bomb.

He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from University

BDT College of Engineering (UBDT), Davanagere,

with a fifth rank in 2000.

He completed his M.Phil in aerodynamics in Queen's University in Belfast,

Ireland in 2003 and obtained is Ph.D in computational

fluid dynamics from Anglia Polytechnic University in UK.
http://dgfun.blogspot.com
Sabeel Ahmed, second son
Obtained his degree in medicine from

Dr B R Ambedkar Medical College in 2003.

He left for the UK in 2004 to pursue MD in surgery.

The two brothers are believed to have joined Tablighi Jamaat three years ago.

It is suspected that Sabeel and Haneef,

the other detained Indian doctor,

were responsible for creating sleeper cells across the country.

They are also believed to have charted

out the plans along with Bilal Abdullah,

the main suspect and a native of Iraq.

Sadia Kausar, daughter
In the final year of MBBS in Kolar.

Haneef's FAMILY

Abdul Sami Khaleel, father
A native of Mudigere in Chikmagalur district, Khaleel

was a teacher in Government Urdu school.

He died in a road accident 15 years ago.

Qurrathunaian, mother
After the death of her husband,

Qurrathunaian moved to Bangalore in 1997 with her three children.
http://dgfun.blogspot.com
Mohammed Haneef, son
The first Indian link to be revealed in the failed UK terror attacks.

A doctor, who graduated from

Dr B R Ambedkar Medical College, Bangalore in 2002.

He was working as a registrar at the Gold Coast Hospital.

He was detained at the Brisbane Airport

when he was returning to Bangalore on a one-way ticket,

apparently to see his new-born baby.

It is believed that apart from planning,

Haneef helped in funding the attacks.

Firdousa Arshiya, wife
Firdousa is a software engineer.

The couple got married three years ago.

She gave birth to the couple's first child, a baby girl, 15 days ago.

Mohammed Shoaib, brother
Engineering student.

Sumayya, sister
An engineer.

She got divorced from her husband recently.

She gave birth to a baby girl a month ago.

How are the Ahmed brothers and Haneef related?
Maqbool Ahmed, the father of Sabeel and Khafeel,

is the son of an uncle of Haneef's mother.


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