The doctor brother of Glasgow Airport suicide bomber Kafeel Ahmed has been acquitted of terrorism charges in India.
Ex-NHS doctor Sabeel Ahmed was arrested by police in New Delhi in February 2021 for allegedly providing logistical and financial assistance to militant group al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent (AQIS).
Reports in India say that Ahmed was one of two men acquitted last week by a court in New Delhi in a high-profile case that saw four of his co-accused sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for conspiracy to commit terrorist activities across India and recruiting members for AQIS.
Despite the acquittal, he remains accused in connection with an alleged terror recruitment plot involving Pakistan-based militant insurgent group Lashkar-e-Taiba, for which he was deported from Saudi Arabia in August 2020 and taken into custody by India’s National Investigation Agency.
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Ahmed is the younger brother of Kafeel Ahmed, who died after driving a Jeep laden with petrol and gas canisters into Glasgow Airport in June 2007.
The doctor, who worked at Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Trust, was jailed for 18 months in April 2008 at London’s Old Bailey for withholding information about the failed suicide car bomb attack, after pleading guilty to failing to disclose information that could have prevented an act of terrorism.
He was then deported to India after his release.
Ahmed told police that his brother was in Iceland carrying out research on global warming, instead of admitting that he knew of his suicide mission.
He continued to mislead detectives investigating the attack for five days, and failed to tell them his brother had texted him shortly before driving into Glasgow Airport, directing him to the “drafts” section of an e-mail account.
When Ahmed logged in an hour after the attack, he found his brother’s suicide note and Islamic will as well as instructions to lie to police about his whereabouts.
Kafeel Ahmed died at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary weeks after the Glasgow Airport attack. He had suffered burns to 90 per cent of his body when he was arrested.
Fellow perpetrator, Iraqi doctor Bilal Talal Samad Abdullah, a passenger in the Jeep, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in December 2009 and sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 32 years.
Abdullah worked less than three miles from the Glasgow Airport terminal building at Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital.
Following Bilal Abdullah’s conviction, Strathclyde Police Assistant Chief Constable Campbell Corrigan said the terrorists had “failed in their attempts to cause mayhem and mass murder at the airport”.
The day before the attack, Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed drove to London from Glasgow in two cars packed with gas canisters, petrol and thousands of nails, before leaving the vehicles outside a nightclub near Piccadilly Circus.
The explosives failed to detonate, and with a police manhunt under way to trace them, the pair then made the decision to launch a suicide attack on Glasgow Airport.
In a “confession” in 2021, Sabeel Ahmed revealed to Hindi News that while he was living and working in England, “he was in constant contact with his elder brother Kafeel Ahmed and during that time Kafeel used to constantly talk to him about Jihad, citing the bad condition of Muslims in the world.”
Hindi News described Ahmed at the time as India’s “richest terrorist” who was “probably the only highly educated terrorist” in the country “whose almost entire family was in the medical profession”.
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