Global terror's India connection

The Glasgow attack is the first known act of global terror involving an Indian Muslim.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
and Mark Rice-Oxley | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 10, 2007 edition

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NEW DELHI and LONDON - When President George Bush visited this country of 150 million Muslims last year, he introduced his wife to the prime minister with a fact surely intended to amaze: "Not one Indian Muslim has joined Al Qaeda," he said.

At a time when Muslim nations from Algeria to Indonesia have emerged as incubators for anti-Western extremists, India – by some estimates the world's second-most-populous Muslim nation – has remained a unique case.

Yet reports from Britain suggest that, for the first time, an Indian Muslim is likely to be implicated in an act of international terrorism. Khafeel Ahmed, the man who police say crashed a Jeep into Glasgow's airport on June 30, is an engineer from Bangalore, a city previously known only as the high-tech capital of the new India.

Until now, Indians' disinterest in the global jihad had been largely taken for granted, experts say. In recent days, however, the nation has been left to try to piece together why a man who holds a PhD in aeronautics from India's golden city was driven to such rage against the West – and whether there will be more to follow.

"There may have been some small-scale radicalization of some communities in India more recently," says Paul Rogers, a global-security expert at Bradford University in England. "If you are looking at the overall situation, the ongoing problems in Iraq and Afghanistan are having a radicalizing effect."

Law enforcement officials working in Britain and India have slowly begun to provide some clarity about the men they have in custody as well as the intent of the plot.

To this point, British authorities have filed charges against only one suspect, Iraq doctor Bilal Abdullah. It is now thought that Dr. Abdullah, a Sunni whose family was hit hard by the Iraqi war, planted the London car bombs and then drove to Glasgow to try and blow up the airport by ramming a Jeep filled with gas canisters into the terminal.

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