Family told of secret global plan

July 7, 2007

THE alleged bombmaker for last week's London and Glasgow attacks told his Indian family that he was working on a "large-scale confidential project".

The Times of India reported yesterday that the Indian national Kafeel Ahmed, an aeronautical engineer with a doctorate from a British university, was one of the men detained after driving a blazing car into Glasgow Airport. He is being treated for serious burns.

"I am involved in a large-scale confidential project. It is about global warming. I cannot reveal the details," he told his family in Bangalore before leaving for Britain in May, the Times of India said.

"It involves a lot of travelling … the project has to be started in the United Kingdom," he was quoted as saying. "Various people from various countries are involved in this."

On June 30 - the day after two car bombs were discovered and defused in London and just before the Glasgow attack - Ahmed told his family in India that his "earlier presentation failed" and asked them to pray for him.

Ahmed, whose first name has also been reported as being Khalid, has been identified as the elder brother of Sabeel Ahmed, an Indian doctor who has also been held in connection with the bombing plot.

Kafeel Ahmed, who lies seriously ill in a Scottish hospital with 90 per cent burns, is an engineer with a PhD, police now believe.

Sources claim he used a house in Houston, near Glasgow, to make the car bombs, packing the vehicles with gas cylinders and petrol.

The mobile phone detonators failed in the two Mercedes cars parked in London's West End and Ahmed chose to drive a third vehicle into the airport himself.

There were unconfirmed reports that the malfunction in the car bombs - one of which was parked outside London's Tiger Tiger nightclub - was due to a medical syringe.

The ABC television network in the US on Wednesday reported that a syringe had been used as part of the firing mechanism of the car bomb, but had not worked, despite repeated calls from the alleged bombers.

The British city of Cambridge is now thought to be at the heart of the terrorism plot in connection with which eight people - six of them National Health Service doctors - have been arrested.

Bilal Abdulla, 27, and Mohammed Asha, 26, studied together at Addenbrooke's Hospital there. Now it has emerged that Sabeel Ahmed, 27, had also spent time there recently.

His reśume in 2005 gave his address as an Islamic Academy in Gilbert Road, Cambridge, and said that his expertise was "computational fluid dynamics", in which computers are used to work out the interaction of fluids and gases with surfaces used in engineering.

Kafeel was visited in Cambridge by his brother, Sabeel, a junior doctor in Liverpool, and police believe it is there that they met Dr Abdulla, the passenger in the Jeep at Glasgow Airport, and Dr Asha.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that Dr Abdulla was a deeply religious Iraqi angry that his prominent Sunni family "lost everything" following the 2003 invasion led by the US and Britain.

"He was hurt by the destruction of his family's property in Iraq," a close relative said during a 2½hour interview in Cambridge. "I think he wanted to be a martyr. He wanted to send out a message to withdraw troops from Iraq. He wanted to cause chaos and fear; he didn't want to kill people. He fears God, and all he wanted to do was die."

Dr Abdulla entered the medical profession reluctantly, pressured by his father, a professor of orthopaedic medicine in Iraq, the relative said. "He was forced into studying medicine. His heart was not in it. To be honest, he passed because his father was a well-known professor, and that's the way it worked in Iraq."

Telegraph, London; The Washington Post; AFP