History
Ahmed was an Indian Muslim born in Bangalore, India and raised in Saudi Arabia during his doctor parents' tenure there. He was an engineer who was studying for a PhD in computational fluid dynamics. He was often mistakenly referred to as a medical doctor in news reports.
Mobile phone records have shown that, during his 2005-2007 stay in India, Ahmed had frequent communications with Malta, the UK, Finland, Saudi Arabia and Oman. In May 2007, prior to departing to Britain from his native Bangalore, he entrusted his mother with a compact disk he said contained some important information on his "project." The disk has been handed over to police for analysis. Although the analysis is not yet complete, it had been revealed that the disk contained speeches by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, propaganda against the United States and Britain, some Jihad literature and the plight of the Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Chechnya. It transpired that Ahmed attentively followed campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, and frequented Islamist chat rooms on the internet. Digital material found included graphic depictions of real-life occurrences of torture in Chechnya, hundreds of bomb design from the internet.
Kafeel was the brother of Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, also arrested in the aftermath of the attack. A suicide note left behind indicates that the passenger of the vehicle, Bilal Abdullah, and himself, intended to die in the attack.
According to police sources, he was an engineer pursuing a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics at Anglia Ruskin University, in the UK, on the topic of "Computational Approach to Ink-jet Printing of Tactile Maps." He would have earned a bachelor of mechanical engineering from India, and an M.Phil. degree in aeronautical engineering from Queen's University Belfast. He might have been in the UK as early as September 2003. He is believed to have organised a Chechnya Day Meeting in his native city of Bangalore, back in February 2006.
As an aeronautics engineer, Ahmed was able to secure employment, from December 2005, to August 2006, with Infotech, an Indian outsourcing company servicing clients such as Airbus and Boeing, before resigning abruptly. It could be possible that he had access to sensitive design information about various aviation companies.
He was a member of the Tablighi Jamaat missionary sect.
Read more about this topic: Kafeel Ahmed
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”
—Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)