'Off late Kafeel had chosen a different mosque'

Bangalore: For 10 years Mohammed Hassaan watched the two boys in the modest grey house across the street from his mosque grow into young professionals and observant Muslims. But in the last few years, he said, things had changed.

Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed moved away from India, taking jobs in Britain, and when they returned for visits they would attend a radical mosque, cutting themselves off from their more moderate Muslim upbringing.

The brothers had chosen "a different mosque ... a different school of thought," Hassaan, the imam of the Khudadaad Mosque, said on Monday.

Today, Kafeel Ahmed is being treated for burns suffered when he set himself on fire after allegedly crashing a car into the Glasgow airport in a failed terror attack. Sabeel Ahmed has been detained in Liverpool in connection with the U.K. terror attacks.

The men's father, Hassaan said, had spoken to him sadly of his sons' turn toward a more militant form of Islam.

"Who can say how or why they changed, but they were different," said the imam.

Officials with the Bangalore mosque the brothers had later attended could not be reached for comment.

Things had started out far differently for the brothers. It was a cosmopolitan family. Both parents were doctors who settled in a simple two-story Bangalore home named "Kauser," after the heavenly lake mentioned in the Quran.

Both boys studied hard. Eventually, Kafeel became an engineer, and Sabeel a doctor. Both moved to Britain.

In the past few years, though, the brothers stopped coming to the neighbourhood mosque when they'd return on visits. Hassaan asked their father to bring them, but he told them "their religious point of view is now very different from ours."

"I do not know what was going on in the hearts and minds of those two men," he said. "This news is a big shock for all of us... We could never have imagined this."

On Monday, meanwhile, investigators said they had seized a computer hard drive belonging to Kafeel Ahmed, 27.

The Bangalore police recovered the hard drive and CDs that Kafeel left in Bangalore when he went back to Britain in early May, said Bangalore's Commissioner of Police N Achuta Rao.

"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," Rao said.

Sabeel Ahmed, 26, was detained in Liverpool on June 30 in connection with the case.

Rao said police have questioned the friends and family of the Ahmeds and Mohammad Haneef, the 27-year-old doctor stopped at the Brisbane airport and arrested based on information from British officials.

Police in Australia on Monday were allowed two more days to question Haneef, who is also from Bangalore and was working at a hospital in eastern Queensland state after emigrating from Britain last year.

He was detained July 2 as he tried to board a flight to India and is being held under counterterrorism laws that allow authorities to detain him without charge.

Also on Monday, the France-based international police agency Interpol blamed the British government for refusing to cooperate with international efforts against terrorism.

"We have received not one name, not one fingerprint, not one telephone number, not one address, nothing, from the UK, about the recent thwarted terrorist attacks," Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble said in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. television.

British officials, however, say they are working to make fuller use of Interpol's data.

The case emerged on June 29, when two cars packed with gas cylinders and nails were discovered in central London. The next day, the flaming Jeep Cherokee smashed into security barriers at Glasgow's airport.

Eight people are in custody as suspects - seven in Britain and one in Australia. But only one has been charged: Bilal Abdullah, an Iraqi doctor identified as the passenger in the Jeep.

The news of the detentions has been a rude jolt in the Ahmed's quiet Bangalore neighbourhood.

Photographers and television crews have been parked in front of their home around the clock. The brothers' parents and sister haven't been seen outside their homes for several days.

"The media has hounded and harassed this family," said B T Venkatesh a human rights lawyer helping the Ahmed family.

"They are simple and religious people and they have no idea what is going on," he said, adding the family had not even been asked by British authorities to officially identify the driver of the Jeep as their son Kafeel.

Venkatesh has been hired by The Lawyer's Collective, a human rights organization.

Ahmed family declined requests for interviews.

On Monday, a woman who identified herself as Sadia Kauser – the sister of Kafeel and Sabeel - said no one in the family would talk to the media.

"You have no idea how our family is suffering right now," she said.