Indian doctor identified as the driver of jeep in failed terror plot

London, July 5 (UNI) Kafeel Ahmed, another Indian doctor, has been identified as the driver of the Jeep Cherokee that rammed into the terminal building at Glasgow airport last week.

With this, the worldwide web of family and professional connections between the alleged car bomb plotters is emerging.

Three of the eight suspects, detained for interrogation, are members of the same family from Bangalore while the families of another two were old friends in the West Asia. Several of them had shared homes in Britain. All except one were doctors in the National Health Service (NHS) hospitals.

Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, who was in the passenger seat of the Cherokee, had become close to 27-year old Kafeel Ahmed while working in the hospital. With 90 per cent burns on his body, Abdulla is now close to death in Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley.

Abdulla had worked at the hospital for 11 months while Ahmed worked for three months only. They also shared a rented house in Houston, five minutes from Glasgow airport.

Further evidence of the close-knit nature of the suspects came with the police swoop on a car in Liverpool on Saturday night.

The driver was Dr Sabeel Ahmed (26) who worked at the Warrington and Halton hospitals in Cheshire . Sabeel is brother of Kafeel Ahmed.

The brothers studied medicine at Rajiv Gandhi University in the city of Bangalore. Last night, Channel Four news claimed that Sabeel Ahmed visited a brother in Cambridge in 2005 when Abdulla and Asha lived in the city.

Dr Mohammed Haneef (27) who was arrested in Brisbane, is a cousin of the Ahmed brothers. He also received his medical degree from the same university in 2002, after studying as part of an affirmative action programme for Muslims and lower castes.

He worked as a locum at Halton Hospital at the same time as Sabeel Ahmed. There are two other unnamed suspects under arrest who worked at the Paisley hospital and would, almost certainly, have known their colleagues in the jeep.

UNI