INDIA:When Sabeel Ahmed (26) did not make his daily telephone call from England to his mother in Bangalore at the weekend, she became worried, writes Rahul Bedi from Bangalore.
A concerned Dr Zakia Ahmed then called his friends in England, only to be told that her doctor son had been detained by the police in connection with the failed car bombings.
Stunned, she called his friends, managing eventually to speak to her son for a "very brief" spell on Tuesday afternoon while he was in police custody.
"Sabeel said he was being looked after well by the police and asked me not to worry," Dr Ahmed said on Wednesday.
Through some family friends in England she then hired a solicitor who told her that there was little to fear as "nothing substantial" was proven against her son.
"My son is in no way a fundamentalist, he is blameless," Dr Ahmed stated emphatically.
However, when it emerged that Sabeel's older brother, Khafil, was the driver of the lethal car meant to explode at Glasgow airport, the Ahmed family declined to meet the media.
They locked themselves inside their house in an affluent Bangalore suburb opposite a mosque, refusing entry even to relatives wanting to offer solace.
"We are already in deep trouble and do not want to make the situation any worse," Dr Ahmed told a local TV reporter late in the evening before slamming the telephone down.
"Please leave us alone," Saudia Kausar, the detained brothers' widowed sister said to a bank of television cameras outside. "We have nothing to say to you."
Meanwhile, the family of Mohammad Haneef, also a doctor from Bangalore, insisted that he was innocent and was heading home to see his newborn daughter when he was detained.
He had a one-way ticket as he was planning to bring his wife and child back to Australia.
"He has been apprehended needlessly . . . He is honourable and upright," Haneef's mother Qurat-ul-ain said in her middle-class flat in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in the city. "Just because he is a Muslim he is being targeted," Haneef's wife Firdous (25) said, cradling her eight-day-old daughter who was to have been named after her husband's arrival.
The software engineer was preparing to welcome Haneef home on Tuesday night when news of his arrest flashed on TV, stunning the entire family.
"He is all alone there . . . I am frantically trying to contact him through the Indian embassy in Australia but they refuse to take my calls," Firdous said.
The son of a schoolteacher, Haneef's is a typical middle-class story of upward social mobility.
After an internship at his alma mater, Haneef worked briefly at the Muslim Alhabeeb hospital in Bangalore before qualifying to practise in England and joining the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.
In November 2005 he returned home and married Firdous, a qualified software engineer from Bangalore - India's information technology capital - who never worked outside the home as she left a week later for Britain with her husband. A few months later the couple moved to Australia and in March Firdous returned to Bangalore to have her baby. Sabeel Ahmed, like Haneef, graduated from the same medical college, but a year later.