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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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