Sabeel’s picture released by British police on Friday. (AP)

London, April 12: Sabeel Ahmed, the young doctor from Bangalore, will be deported to India “in the near future”, accompanied by “a member of the UK border agency and two officers”.

He will be handed over to the Indian authorities.

India House in London cannot get formally involved yet because its diplomats have not yet been told of the directive by an Old Bailey judge that Sabeel, an Indian national, should be deported immediately to India.

“We are closed until Tuesday and we will need to check his passport and his UK visa,” a source said.

Last night, after only a day in court, Justice Calvert-Smith sentenced Sabeel to 18 months in jail after the 26-year-old pleaded guilty to withholding information contained in an email sent from Glasgow by his brother, Kafeel Ahmed, a 28-year-old engineer with a PhD.

Kafeel died from 90 per cent burns sustained when he rammed a jeep into the terminal building in Glasgow airport on the afternoon of June 30 last year. Later that evening, Sabeel was picked up by police near Liverpool’s Lime Street railway station and a search of his home turned up the laptop and the email message sent by Kafeel.

In his email, Kafeel had told Sabeel he was about to commit a terrorist outrage but couched it in the language of Islamic martyrdom.

What saved Sabeel from a five-year sentence was that he read the email after the terrorist incident in Glasgow. Had he read it before and not gone to the police, he would have been dealt with harshly.

According to Scotland Yard sources, Sabeel, now in the hands of the immigration service, could be deported “within a week”.

However, two other related trials — of Bilal Abdullah, 28, and Mohammed Asha, 27, who have been charged with conspiracy to cause explosions — are due to begin later this year.

The UK authorities may consider it useful to hold Sabeel in custody until these trials are over. He could be here “for weeks or even months” was one prediction.

Sabeel, who has been in custody since his arrest on June 30 last year, can consider himself lucky he is getting away so lightly. The judge decided that since he has already been on remand for half the length of his sentence, he could be deported immediately as he had expressed a wish to be sent back to India.

But did Sabeel really know about Kafeel’s drift towards militant Islam?

The Indian authorities will be interested in his answers.

In April 2005, shortly after completing his medical degree in Bangalore, Sabeel travelled to Britain to continue his studies. He and Kafeel set up home in Cambridge before Sabeel moved on to Liverpool.

The Old Bailey heard he found work at Halton General Hospital before he briefly returned to his family in India. Immigration records showed that he returned in December when he undertook a clinical apprenticeship. And in August 2006, Sabeel began further work for the North Cheshire Hospitals NHS Trust. At the time of his arrest, Sabeel was living in Ramilies Road, Liverpool.

Appearing in the dock at the Old Bailey yesterday, bearded Sabeel wore a bright purple shirt with a biro in the chest pocket. He listened carefully with his head bowed as the prosecution read out the emails he had received from his brother.

According to prosecution lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw, Sabeel refused to help the police when he was interviewed and concealed the information he had. The emails would have been of “considerable assistance” to the counter-terrorist police.

Laidlaw said Sabeel “did not exercise his right to silence” but instead tried to mislead investigators.

The judge took a charitable view of Sabeel though the Indian authorities will now want to know from him how his elder brother was contacted and brainwashed by his terrorist minders. Most specifically, they will want to know whether this happened in Bangalore or outside India.

Sentencing Sabeel, Justice Calvert-Smith told him: “Just before he (Kafeel) set off on the attack, he sent you a text message telling you to access the site to which he had saved his document. It is clear that Kafeel Ahmed wrote it in anticipation of his own death in the hope that his body may be unrecognisable and unidentifiable, and asked you to keep up a pretence that he was in Iceland on some secret project connected with his work as a scientist.”

The judge said: “It is clear you did not receive it until afterwards. Having opened the document on the website and realising your brother had been involved in a very serious offence, you kept that to yourself rather than going to the authorities. I accept there is no sign of you being an extremist or party to extremist views.”

Sabeel agreed to tell the police his brother’s cover story that he was away in Iceland working on a global warming project, the judge pointed out.