Kafeel’s mother Zakia and sister Sadia outside her Bangalore house

Bangalore, July 13: Dr Zakia Ahmed and Sadia, the mother and sister of UK terror suspects Kafeel and Sabeel, were questioned again today.

The women have come in for intense questioning over the past two days after it was found that Kafeel had removed the hard disk from his home computer and handed it to his mother for safekeeping before he left for Britain in May.

Zakia later gave it to daughter Sadia, an MBBS student, who passed it on to a male friend.

The disk has been recovered from the house of Sadia’s friend.

Police are taking expert help to crack the electronic codes behind which Kafeel hid downloaded material in the hard disk.

When the codes proved too difficult for the police’s cyber crime cell, the disk was handed to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

But the institute did not have the equipment to decode it, so it suggested that the disk be sent to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) — the science wing of the Centre’s department of information technology — in Thiruvananthapuram.

“The C-DAC has broken the codes and made a copy of the hard disk. The two copies are being deciphered by the C-DAC and a police team here along with IISc experts,” a senior police officer said.

“The process is frustratingly slow, but we are piecing together the files, emails and chats. We know that attempts were made to hide the messages in word and picture files. Deciphering them is taking longer than anticipated. The central agencies are also helping out.”

Kafeel, an aeronautical engineer, had worked with Bangalore’s Infotech Enterprises from December 2005 to July 2006.

He is now fighting for his life with 90 per cent burns at a UK hospital after ramming a burning Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow airport terminal.