INDIA:Indian police sought help from experts yesterday to decipher the high-capacity hard disks seized from the home of two Indian suspects detained for their suspected involvement in Britain's failed car bomb plot.
The disks, along with CDs from the computer used by Kafeel Ahmed (27) and his brother, Sabeel (26), in their parents' home in Bangalore, southern India, are being sent for decoding to the Resource Centre for Cyber Forensics at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in neighbouring Kerala state, officials said.
"We are examining the disks for jihadi content," a senior Bangalore police officer said. E-mails sent by the brothers are also being investigated for any terrorist links, he added.
Police have also been questioning the brothers' relatives, including their doctor parents and sister in Bangalore, where the two lived before leaving for the UK.
A third of Bangalore's nine million citizens are, like the Ahmeds, of Muslim origin.
Kafeel, who studied engineering in India and later in Northern Ireland and Cambridge, suffered critical burns after allegedly crashing a Cherokee Jeep into Glasgow airport on June 30th, a day after police found two unexploded car bombs in central London. He is presently being treated in a Scottish hospital.
Sabeel, a doctor, was arrested in Liverpool 10 days ago for his alleged involvement in the bombing plot.
Indian security sources said the Ahmed brothers were active members of the Student Islamic Organisation (SIO), an offshoot of the radical Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), which was banned six years ago for involvement in terrorist strikes across India. They reportedly joined SIO around 2001 and soon after attended a seminar on Islam organised by it in Uttar Pradesh.
Here they are believed to have urged the 4,000-odd participants to join the more radical Tablighi Jamaat Islamist movement.
Intelligence sources claimed Kafeel, who loved designing machines and drawing blueprints, might have begun researching bomb-making in Bangalore some weeks before leaving for Britain on May 5th to complete his doctoral work.
Muhammad Haneef, a third Indian suspect, also a doctor from Bangalore and related to the Ahmed brothers, began his second week in detention in Australia without being charged yesterday, as criticism mounted that Australia's new counter-terror laws had left him in indefinite legal limbo.
Haneef's lawyer said he would challenge any further extension to his detention.
Investigations revealed that Haneef regularly transferred less than $10,000 (€7,300) from his Australian bank account to a host of unnamed people in Bangalore to avoid being monitored by the authorities.
Indian security sources said these money transfers could implicate Haneef as being part of a "sleeper cell" in Australia responsible for funding jihadi activity in India and abroad.