Dongri to Dubai - Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia

by Hussain Zaidi

  Iqbal was now left with little recourse, other than fighting the charges in court, and his case went on for several years in the court of special judge A.P. Bhangale. During the course of the trial, the police discovered that Iqbal’s voice had also been recorded on the tapes. Although there was no concrete evidence on the tapes to incriminate Iqbal, the Mumbai police nevertheless decided that some action, whatever it was, had to be taken. The then Commissioner of Police A.N. Roy, using the police chief’s prerogative under Section 311 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), decided to sack Aslam Momin for what was described as his ‘alleged involvement with the underworld’. Three years after Iqbal’s fateful call to Aslam, the latter was unceremoniously booted out of his job by Roy. Naturally, Aslam was distraught and went to the tribunal to see if he could clear his name. The Mumbai police did not make this task any easier and took their own sweet time to provide the requisite affidavits. The entire process took an excruciating fifteen months, but Aslam was finally given a clean chit.

  Unfortunately for the former inspector, the Mumbai police quickly went to the high court to appeal against his clean chit and Aslam had to wage yet another long drawn-out battle against his own former bosses with no immediate reprieve in sight.

  In 2004, inspired by the example set by Arun Gawli, who was then a member of the legislative assembly despite the significant handicap of being lodged at Arthur Road Jail, Iqbal decided to contest the elections as an Independent candidate from the Umerkhadi constituency. With everything in place, he filed his nominations and was all set to go head-to-head with the Nationalist Congress Party’s Bashir Patel. It was then that something went awry and Iqbal had to withdraw his nominations.

  It is widely believed and was reported in the Times of India on 28 September 2004 that a high-ranking IPS officer who enjoyed a close proximity with an NCP politician, was responsible for getting Iqbal to withdraw his nomination. The story goes that Iqbal was threatened that ‘the cops would not spare him if he contested’ the elections.

  Over three years later, in the MCOCA court, where Iqbal was still fighting his case, Bhangale was no longer the judge and was replaced by Judge M.A. Bhatkar. She found that there was insufficient evidence against Iqbal, his voice did not match the one on the tape, and there was not a shred of information linking him to the Sara-Sahara Shopping Complex. Finally, it was then, four years since his return to India, that Iqbal could walk away a free man.

  The case, however, was not totally unfruitful for the police as they saw three people from the BMC and other government agencies suspended for their involvement in the shopping complexes. The entire ‘Dawood Mall’ was also ordered to be torn down to the ground. The shopkeepers saw their cash cows slowly slipping from their grip and were naturally, up in arms. They went to the high court and managed to get a stay order against the demolition. Undeterred, the state went to the Supreme Court and managed to get the final orders for demolition.

  While the only remnants of the Sara-Sahara Complex today are in the memories of the shopkeepers, for Aslam, the nightmare has refused to end. Even today, he is still under suspicion and continues to wage his lone struggle, contesting his case. There does not seem to be any relief in sight for him because he believes that he will still be fighting his case well into his retirement.

  Iqbal seemed to have learnt his lessons albeit the hard way. The surname of Kaskar had been a stigma and he realised that the name would keep getting him into trouble. He decided to approach the Bombay High Court and asked to change his name to Shaikh Iqbal Hasan instead of Iqbal Hasan Kaskar.

  25

  Global Terrorist

  After a struggle of over a decade, the Indian government finally managed to convince the mighty United States that Dawood Ibrahim was now a crucial cog in the wheel for terror activities perpetrated internationally.

  The Indian government had launched intensive efforts to convince Uncle Sam that Dawood, who organised the serial blasts of 1993 in Mumbai, was capable of attacking the US interests anywhere in the world because of his liaisons with Osama Bin Laden. The initiative finally worked with Capitol Hill though it took over 10 years and 6 months to achieve their desired objective.

  The US Treasury Department on 16 October 2003 announced that it was designating Dawood Ibrahim as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under Executive Order 13224 and would be requesting the United Nations to list him as well. The global terrorist designation froze any assets belonging to Dawood within the US and prohibited transactions with US nationals. The UN listing required that all UN members take similar actions.

  While proclaiming him a global terrorist, the US government declared, ‘This designation signals our commitment to identifying and attacking the financial ties between the criminal underworld and terrorism,’ stated Juan Zarate, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes. He added, ‘We are calling on the international community to stop the flow of dirty money that kills. For the Ibrahim syndicate, the business of terrorism forms part of their larger criminal enterprise, which must be dismantled.’

  The executive order clearly describes Dawood Ibrahim as an Indian crime lord who has found common cause with Al Qaeda, sharing his smuggling routes with the terror syndicate and funding attacks by Islamic extremists aimed at destabilising the Indian government. He was wanted in India for the 1993 Bombay Stock Exchange bombings, it stated, and is known to have financed the activities of the LeT, a group designated by the United States in October 2001 and ostensibly banned by the Pakistani Government—which also froze their assets—in January 2002.

  Another US Congressional report released simultaneously identified the D Company as a ‘5,000-member criminal syndicate operating mostly in Pakistan, India, and the United Arab Emirates,’ which has a ‘strategic alliance’ with the ISI and has ‘forged relationships with Islamists, including Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Al Qaida’.

  The report, prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the research wing of Congress, was aimed at priming US lawmakers on various issues, and had no immediate policy implications. The US Department of Treasury had already designated Dawood as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) and subsequently President George W. Bush designated him, as well as his D Company organisation, a Significant Foreign Narcotics Trafficker under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act.

  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 Dub
ai 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

  As 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.