Updated: August 30, 2020 7:39:54 am
Sabeel Ahmed
An Indian doctor, who was deported from the UK in 2007 after his older brother carried out a suicide attack at Glasgow airport, was arrested on Friday arriving in New Delhi after his deportation from Saudi Arabia, where he was detained. in connection with an alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) Recruitment Plot registered in Bangalore in 2012.
Dr. Sabeel Ahmed, 38, was presented in a Delhi court and will be brought to Bengaluru with a traffic warrant, an NIA source said.
When he was first linked to the LeT case in 2013, Sabeel had denied knowledge of the conspiracy.
Fourteen of the 17 people arrested (out of 25 accused) in the case have pleaded guilty and have been released after serving prison terms.
“A team from the NIA’s Bengaluru field office arrived in Delhi and arrested him yesterday. He has been brought before the court and placed in pretrial detention in transit, ”the NIA source said on Saturday.
Sabeel is the younger brother of Indian-born aeronautical engineer Kafeel Ahmed, involved in the June 29, 2007 suicide bombing at Glasgow Airport. Sabeel, then 25 and in London, was deported to India for failing to reveal prior knowledge of his brother’s planned attack.
In 2010, Sabeel moved to Saudi Arabia and worked at King Fahad Hospital. In 2015, the NIA named him as a defendant in the LeT’s alleged 2012 plot to recruit youth in the country. A court order without bail and a surveillance notice were issued against him in the case.
In an initial charge sheet filed in 2015, Sabeel was identified only as a “Motu doctor,” but the deportation and arrest from Saudi Arabia in December 2015 of Asadullah Khan, 57, of Hyderabad, helped the NIA to establish the identity of “Motu doctor” as Dr. Sabeel Ahmed from Bangalore.
It is alleged that Sabeel introduced two key players in LeT’s alleged 2010-11 recruitment plot: his brother-in-law Imran Ahmed, a dentist, and a Bengaluru engineer named Mohammed Shahid Faisal, aka Ustad. Imran was arrested in 2013 during a visit from Saudi Arabia with a false passport, and the NIA reported that Ustad ran away.
Linked to the case after Imran’s arrest, Sabeel had stated in a statement from Saudi Arabia: “I understand that the accusation against me is that I have been part of some meetings in Riyadh and Dammam (in Saudi Arabia), where these conspiracies they were hatched. I categorically deny having attended such meetings. “
“I am also given to understand that they accuse me of financing and providing logistical support to the plot. It’s ridiculous… I’ve never had an excess of money to distribute to people without knowing what to do with money, ”he had said.
In 2017, Ahmed was also named by the Delhi Police Special Cell for being among a dozen missing Indians allegedly trying to establish Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS).
Sabeel will now face trial in connection with the LeT recruitment case, first recorded by Bengaluru police as a plot to target columnist Prathap Simha, now a BJP deputy from Mysuru.
Intelligence agencies and police reportedly discovered the original trace of the alleged recruitment plot after two young men, Dr. Zafar Iqbal Sholapur and Abdul Hakeem Jamadar, traveled to Pakistan via Iran in December 2011 to allegedly join the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were sent back by suspected ISI agents and monitoring of their activities after their return revealed that they were in contact with Indian terrorist fugitives linked to LeT based in Saudi Arabia.
On September 15, 2016, a special Bengaluru court sentenced 14 men arrested in the case to five years in prison after they pleaded guilty. As they had already been in prison for almost five years, they were released a few months after their conviction.
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The NIA filed a separate charge sheet against 11 individuals, the Saudi Arabian-based alleged recruiters of the youth, who were missing at the time of the initial trial, including Dr. Ahmed. Among those still at large in the case are Shaheed Faisal, aka Ustad, an engineer from Bengaluru, and a LeT veteran from Hyderabad named Farhatullah Ghori, who are also named in the 2016 AQIS recruitment plan by the Special Cell. of the Delhi Police.
In the Delhi Police AQIS case, a fast track court in Delhi issued a proclamation warrant against Sabeel Ahmed and the other missing men.
According to investigators, the doctor’s alleged links to the AQIS recruiting plot stemmed from statements given to the police by a key defendant in the case, Abdul Rehman Khan, 38, of Cuttack, Odisha, who was arrested in December. 2015. Khan was allegedly at the center of efforts by AQIS-India and its local boss, Mohammed Asif, 41, a resident of Deepa Sarai in the Sambhal region of Uttar Pradesh, to recruit young Indians on the instructions of the alleged head of AQIS, Maulana Asim Umar.
According to Khan’s statements to the police, he had met with Sabeel in Bengaluru in 2009, when the doctor was based in the city after being deported from the UK. Khan is alleged to have later met with Ahmed in Saudi Arabia in 2012, where they allegedly discussed conscription.
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