An Indian doctor who was convicted of withholding information about a botched terror attack on a crowded airport in Scotland last year returned to India yesterday after being deported — and will now face questioning by local police.
Sabeel Ahmed, 26, arrived in Bangalore yesterday escorted by two British policemen, after serving 270 days in jail in Britain.
Airport security whisked him out through a separate exit to avoid reporters and photographers waiting outside.
He is the younger brother of Kafeel Ahmed, an engineer, who drove a jeep into the Glasgow airport terminal building on June 30 last year and set it alight.
Kafeel died later in hospital from 90 percent burns.
Police later arrested Sabeel Ahmed after learning that he was sent an e-mail with details of the attacks from his brother before he drove the jeep to the Glasgow airport — although he did not read the e-mail until after the attack took place.
Sabeel was sentenced to 18 months in jail last month, but was allowed to go free because he had already spent around half that time in custody, and after he had confessed and signed a document stating that he would return to India voluntarily.
Sabeel’s mother, a retired doctor, said yesterday that her son was tired and resting.
“He did not cry, I cried. We are all happy to have him back,” Zakia Ahmed said.
However, Indian police said they were interested in questioning him, as part of an investigation into the banned Muslim group, the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI).
“It could be a routine investigation,” said a senior officer of the Corps of Detectives in the state of Karnataka state.
“We want to examine his role before he left India,” said the officer, who did not want to be named.
SIMI has been blamed for helping to carry out several bomb attacks in India.
Police have arrested a medical student and a software engineer in Bangalore recently, following the arrest of the group’s leader Safdori Nagori and 12 other senior members in March.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
RSS