Dongri to Dubai (53 page)

According to the report, Dawood began his foray in terrorism as a ‘criminal specialist’ in Bombay, first as a low-level smuggler in the seventies and later as the leader of a poly-crime syndicate. He formed a thriving criminal enterprise throughout the eighties and became radicalised in the nineties, forging relationships with Islamists, including LeT and Al Qaeda. D Company’s evolution into a true criminal-terrorist group began in response to the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the subsequent riots that killed hundreds of Muslims, the report said, clearly indicating the lack of research and shallow observations of the American research group.

‘Outraged by the attacks on fellow Muslims and believing the Indian government acted indifferently to their plight, Ibrahim decided to retaliate. Reportedly with assistance of the ISI, D-Company launched a series of bombing attacks on March 12, 1993, killing 257 people. Following the attacks, Ibrahim moved his organization’s headquarters to Karachi, Pakistan,’ the report added, mincing no words about the terrorist don’s Pakistani location and patronage.

The US Treasury Department’s website gives his location as Karachi and identifies him by his Pakistani passport bearing number G869537, and his telephone number as 021-5892038.

Certainly, Dawood has not been sighted in Karachi or Dubai for some time, but while he kept travelling between these two cities, his activities must have been well-known to the CIA hawks, but they never decided to designate Dawood a global terrorist until trouble landed on their doorstep.

And it was not as if Dawood made much effort to keep a low profile. Whether in Dubai or Karachi, he was courted by top South Asian cricketers for his cricket betting activities. Similarly, with regard to Bollywood, hardly a film could be produced in India without investment from Dawood. Dawood’s guests were always lavishly entertained, and the best Scotch flowed, even in a dry country.

Dawood’s underworld connections are extensive, and he ‘sublets’ his name in Pakistan, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, to ‘franchises’ in the fields of drug trafficking and gambling dens.

At the time of the declaration, India’s Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, who also looked after the Home Affairs Ministry, said the US designation of Dawood as a global terrorist vindicated India’s stand. Since its inception, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government was stridently parlaying for Dawood’s extradition to India and seeking US help in keeping a check on Pakistan’s nefarious activities.

The government had demanded that Pakistan hand over Dawood, who figures in India’s twenty most wanted men from Pakistan. Advani said Dawood’s handing over to New Delhi would improve relations between the two countries. But the Pakistan spokesman retorted, ‘This is a false premise. Relations cannot improve on the basis of such premises.’

The BJP had cleverly begun collating details on Dawood’s network across the world. The D Dossier, as it had become known in the core group of the government, clearly mentioned that Dawood had travelled through Afghanistan in the nineties under Taliban protection, which was later corroborated by the US Treasury Department statement, and it had now been confirmed that his routes and networks converge at many significant points with those of none other than the late Osama Bin Laden, the D Dossier said. This is the reason why the US has suddenly become alert about Dawood’s importance. Some analysts, however, speculate that Dawood’s handlers in the Pakistani intelligence apparatus, especially the ISI, may have forced him to surrender his network and his smuggling routes to the Al Qaeda.

It was on the basis of inputs by Indian intelligence that the US went hammer and tongs after Dawood. Advani had shared reams of ‘top secret’ information with top officials of the Bush administration during his visit to the US. Advani’s trump card during his US visit was that he focused on Dawood’s links with the LeT and Al Qaeda, knowing fully well that Washington was not interested in Dawood’s anti-India operations. Advani gave plenty of evidence to the US of how Dawood was no longer an underworld don but a shipping magnate, media baron, drug trafficker, arms trafficker, and the CEO of a huge corporate called D Company, all rolled into one.

Advani’s masterstroke lay in the presentation that how Dawood’s operations had lately turned against Israeli interests and that of the US. The Americans would have never acted on Dawood had it not been for the double attack by suspected Al Qaeda cadres in Mombassa (Kenya) in November 2002. The terrorists attacked a hotel where Israeli tourists were staying and almost simultaneously made an abortive attempt to blow up an airliner packed with Israelis. Shortly after the Mombassa incidents, Dawood’s main operations man, Anees Ibrahim, was picked up in Dubai. The IB officials and RAW operatives emphatically tried to prove how Dawood had contributed in the Mombassa incidents. The D Company had a warehouse in Mombassa and Anees Ibrahim was its chief operator. It is understood that Advani educated the US on this particular aspect of the D Company’s operations. India already had a lot of information available on this subject in the wake of the arrest of another D Company operative, Madad Chatur, who was picked up in Kenya and jailed there some four years ago.

Pakistan’s claim that Dawood was not on its soil was demolished when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control determined that he had a Pakistani passport and a Karachi telephone number. Indian intelligence agencies were well aware that Dawood’s residence was an ISI-protected house in Peshawar. Islamabad protested its innocence at the most authoritative level when its then President Pervez Musharraf denied any knowledge about Dawood’s whereabouts during the July 2001 Agra Summit.

This position was not changed after the Pakistani media reported that Dawood was operating in the country with official patronage. The de facto Home Minister of Sindh, Aftab Sheikh, sprang a surprise when he announced that Dawood was running his network from the capital of the province. But Sheikh and the US were contradicted by a spokesman of the Pakistan government, proving that Dawood was protected by powerful elements in that country.

The mafioso from Mumbai had been so useful to Pakistan’s intelligence services and in return had learnt so much about the activities of the ISI that they could never be handed over to the US, let alone to India. Dawood was accorded Pakistani citizenship so that he could save himself from the clutches of law in India for his role in the 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts and other cases registered against him. India has been asking Pakistan to hand him over to New Delhi along with the others whose names figure on the most wanted list of twenty fugitives submitted to Islamabad, but the stock reply from the other side is that Dawood is not in Pakistan. This was what Islamabad said again after the American admission of the Indian viewpoint.

After his cover was blown, Dawood reportedly shifted his headquarters to Peshawar. When General Musharraf had visited India in July 2001, the Pakistan government knew he would be confronted with the demand for his custody, and so Dawood was sent out to Singapore so that Musharraf could say that he was not on Pakistani soil.

Dawood, Shakeel, and Ibrahim alias Tiger Memon, all three listed among the twenty most wanted men by India from Pakistan, were granted Pakistani citizenship in June 2003. Dawood has also undergone a name change and his new identity is Iqbal Seth alias Amer Sahib, while Chhota Shakeel is known as Haji Mohammad and Tiger Memon as Ahmed Jamil. The underworld don had been issued his first Pakistani passport number G866537 at Rawalpindi on 12 August 1991.

Soon after the US Treasury Department declared Dawood a specially designated global terrorist, the Pakistan Deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi was summoned to the Foreign Office to convey India’s demand that Dawood Ibrahim be handed over to New Delhi to face charges pending against him in connection with widespread extortions and the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993. But, given the flat denial of Pakistan, there is a big question mark over the US action’s making any difference to the Pakistan Government’s stand.

For India, however, this is a big shot in the arm and a long overdue success in making the world a smaller place for their bê te noire Dawood Ibrahim.

26

Salem’s Extradition

A
s a fallout of Anees’ vengeful attitude towards him, Salem was arrested in Lisbon along with Monica Bedi one fine day in 2002 when he was at her apartment. Locked up in a jail just outside Lisbon, Salem knew that the CBI was exploring all diplomatic and legal channels to have him extradited to India so that they could take custody of him. Fortunately for Salem, the legal battle between Portugal and India was a protracted one, as the two countries have no extradition treaty between them. Besides, the Indian government’s track record with securing extradition was less than average, to put it politely.

In 1995, the government attempted to have drug lord Iqbal Memon (known in some circles as Iqbal Mirchi) extradited from London. Years later, the government tried to have music composer Nadeem Saifi extradited for allegedly paying for the murder of music magnate Gulshan Kumar, which was carried out by Salem’s shooter. Both these efforts were in vain. Despite spending a truckload of money and lawyers and cops making scores of trips to London, the Indian government failed to extradite any of the accused.

The CBI’s legal eagles were arriving in droves to secure Salem’s extradition after Portugal refused to deport him. The Government of India then invoked a special treaty with its Portuguese counterpart and extradition was quickly back on the cards. However, the Portuguese government sought several assurances from India. The CBI, which originally had twenty-four cases against Salem, began paring down the list of charges, which resulted in his escaping charges of having murdered Gulshan Kumar.

Meanwhile, Salem’s dream relationship with Monica Bedi was slowly beginning to deteriorate. From the perky, love-filled and optimistic letters that she used to send him in the past, the tone of her latest communiqués was turning frustrated, confused, scared, and increasingly cryptic. Lines like ‘
Babu, tumhe Khudaa bula rahe hain
[God is calling you]’ were confusing him to no end. After all, it was the occasional meetings with Monica and the thought of being with her that kept him going throughout his time behind bars.

In a letter to Salem, she wrote that her new faith seemed to have given her a new way to deal with problems. She added that she was shattered by the verdict that the Supreme Court had delivered against Salem and her and so, in her hour of need, she decided to reach out to Jesus Christ and turn Christian. Finally, in January 2005, the CBI began preparing to bring Salem back, but it was only in the month of November that year that Salem was sent back to India via Cairo on a special aircraft. A team comprising CBI Deputy Inspector General Omprakash Chatwal, Deputy Superintendent of Police Devendra Pardesi, and two inspectors, including a woman inspector, was rushed across to Portugal from Mumbai to take charge of Salem and Monica.

Salem had served a three-year sentence in Portugal and was extradited on the conditions that there would be no death sentence, he would not be ill-treated and he could be given no sentence longer than twenty-five years. Communications broke down further between the former lovers and their strained relationship truly reached its nadir when the CBI team brought Salem and Monica back to Mumbai from Lisbon. All through both legs of the journey (Lisbon to Cairo and Cairo to Mumbai), Monica refused to even glance at Salem, choosing instead to sit quietly, clutching her Bible. They had landed in Portugal as man and wife, but were leaving as strangers.

And so, Salem began his stay at Arthur Road Jail as a resident of the
anda
cell—10 x 10 feet, oval-shaped, high security cell, where one is in solitary confinement and has no contact with the outside world. The government did not want to risk Salem being attacked or worse yet, killed in jail and so, he was kept in this cell for around a month or so. Once the authorities were satisfied that Salem’s life was in no immediate peril, he was moved to Barrack No. 10.

This particular barrack has been home to a number of major gangsters and others accused in high-profile cases and is considered to be among the most luxurious of barracks. Inmates had access to a few amenities and things that would be considered a massive luxury in any other barrack. Being moved to Barrack No. 10 saw Salem reunited with his old friends from the underworld and life was good again.

His nephew ensured that the procurement of branded goods and restaurant-made food was delivered to Salem. Apart from regular trips to the court for hearings of the cases in which he was an accused, life was good for Salem until the day the 1993 Mumbai blast accused were handed their sentences. With most of the convicts being sent to Thane Jail and Yerawada Jail, Anees’s one-time right-hand-man saw his set of friends dwindling. The only person left with him at Arthur Road was Mustafa Dossa.

Very soon, two sensational murder cases saw navymen Manish Thakur (accused of killing his girlfriend) and Emile Jerome Matthew (accused of killing media executive Neeraj Grover) being arrested and Salem had new companions. But they too could not protect the vain Salem from the famous ‘sharpened spoon attack’ at the hands of Dossa in 2010, one which left his face partially scarred.

27

Boucher’s Botched Attempt

I
t has been over three years since the Treasury Department of the United States has declared Dawood Ibrahim as a global terrorist. Despite the branding, albeit after much chest-thumping by
India, it does not translate into: ‘We are going to bring him to book and get
Pakistan
to send him back to
India’.
For the
US, Dawood is simply not in their scheme of things.