AP Features, July 11th, 2007
After nine days of waiting, Muhammad Shuaib finally heard news of his brother.
On Wednesday morning, Muhammad Haneef, the Indian doctor detained in Australia in connection with last month's U.K. terror plot, spoke to his wife, Arshiya Firdaus. She is living in India with their 2-week-old daughter, whom Haneef has never seen.
"He spoke for just one minute but he told her that he was well and he sent everyone at home his love and prayers," Shuaib said, sitting in the living room of the family's Bangalore home.
It was the first time anyone in the family had heard from Haneef since his July 2 arrest.
"I'm his mother and my child is all alone in another country in a prison," said Qurat-ul-ain, a slender woman in a blue sari, which she uses to cover her head.
His family says Haneef was raised in an observant but moderate home by his schoolteacher father and homemaker mother.
"He used to pray five times a day, or fast during Ramadan, but that was just one part of his life," said Shuaib, an engineering student. "But he also loved watching movies and downloading the latest Hindi film and pop music from the Internet ... He is a modern religious man."
Haneef is one of three Indian men detained in connection with the terror plot. The other two, brothers Sabeel and Kafeel Ahmed, are also from Bangalore. Haneef is a distant cousin of the brothers.
Kafeel Ahmed, 27, is in a Scottish hospital with burns suffered after allegedly crashing a Jeep Cherokee into the Glasgow airport on June 30, a day after police found two unexploded car bombs in central London. Sabeel Ahmed is being held in Liverpool as a suspect in the plot.
Sabeel Ahmed and Haneef both attended B.R. Ambedkar Medical College in Bangalore, where principal B.R. Ramesh remembered them as being well-adjusted and good-natured.
"Until anything is proven, we can't believe this," he said.
Haneef was planning to get his newborn daughter a passport and take his mother, wife and child back to Australia, the family said.
"He didn't know when everyone would be ready to leave and how long the passport would take so he had a one-way ticket," his mother added.
Australian Federal Police sought permission Wednesday from a magistrate to continue detaining Haneef under counterterrorism laws.
