One of the Indian suspects in the failed terror attack on Glasgow airport was a design engineer for an outsourcing company servicing some of the biggest names in the aviation and defence industry, it emerged yesterday.
Kafeel Ahmed, 27, who is in a Scottish hospital with 90 per cent burns to his body after allegedly crashing a Jeep into the airport’s concourse on June 30, worked at Infotech Enterprises in Bangalore from December 2005 to August 2006.
As an aeronautical engineer, Mr Ahmed may have had access to sensitive information about blue-chip clients, which include Boeing and Airbus.
Infotech Enterprises is a $120 million IT and design outsourcing company headquartered in Hyderbad with 25 offices around the world including in the UK and the US.
One of its showcase projects in Britain was for the Home Office, building a web-based crime reduction application for local authorities in Cornwall and Devon. Mr Ahmed’s ability, on the back of a good education and stable family background, to infiltrate a reputable outfit at the time he was forming radical Islamic views is likely to alarm western organisations and governments with significant back-office investments in India.
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The company confirmed that Mr Ahmed was an employee for eight months in its Bangalore development centre but declined to say what specific projects he was associated with.
However, a spokesman insisted Mr Ahmed did not have any dealings with UK customers nor could he have been privy to highly sensitive government data before he abruptly resigned last summer.
“Our networks are secured for each customer. He worked under strict conditions. It would have been impossible for him to access any information outside his brief,” K S Susindar told The Times.
“He was a normal employee and he had the right qualifications. There were no signs of anything else.”
Mr Ahmed and his brother Sabeel, 26, a doctor, are among eight men being held in connection with the terrorist plot.
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Indian investigators have seized a computer and CDs from their Bangalore family home, which is named Kauser after the heavenly lake in the Koran. They are looking for anything that might connect the brothers to Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor identified as a passenger in the Jeep and the only man to be charged.
“The hard disk is being examined to ascertain the contents and possible connection to the UK incident and also regarding terrorist activity, if any, in India and elsewhere,” N. Achuta Rao, Bangalore’s police commissioner, said.
Reports in India yesterday suggested Dr Abdullah may have visited the brothers in Bangalore.
Local Muslim leaders said that the brothers had stopped coming to the more moderate neighbourhood mosque after visits to Britain, during which it is thought their religious views were radicalised.
Members of the Ahmed family have refused to come out of their house, besieged by camera crews, since news broke of their possible links to the UK terrorist threat.
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BT Venkatesh, a human rights lawyer helping the family said the British authorities had not asked them to identify the driver of the Jeep as their son, Kafeel.
“The media has hounded and harassed this family,” he said. “They are simple and religious people and they have no idea what is going on.”