Flawed justice

The site of the blast at the Gateway of India , Mumbai, one of a series that shook the city. The latest conviction has brought little comfort to victims. - PAUL NORONHA

A Mumbai court convicts some of the accused in the March 1993 serial bombings, but the key perpetrators are still safe in Pakistan.

"MY house was set ablaze during the riots," said Shahnawaz Qureshi, struggling to explain his motives for parking a van filled with high explosives outside Mumbai's Plaza Cinema in March 1993, "and then I was misled." "I was taken to Dubai," Qureshi told a Mumbai court after he was convicted for his role in the serial bombings that ripped apart the city that month, "on the pretext of finding an alternative job. From Dubai, I was taken to Pakistan and then sent back to India via Dubai." He now faces a life in prison, or even death.

The man who misled Qureshi - and organised, funded and executed the Mumbai serial bombings - is not likely to see the inside of a prison any time soon. If Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar is still alive, his life most likely resembles those of the make-belief mafia lords who litter the scripts of the many pop films he financed. The Ratnagiri-born son of a police constable, Dawood Ibrahim prefers to rise after noon. After a game of tennis, he sets off to one of the several highly secured safe houses from which he conducts his business.

His evenings are built around large doses of Black Label whisky, teen-patta gambling and mujra cabaret performances. "Carousing through the night," recorded the well-known Karachi-based journalist Ghulam Hasnain, the last Pakistani journalist unwise enough to expose official denials that the terrorist was in that country, "Dawood and his companions quit only at dawn and then collectively offer prayers."

Ever since India formally demanded Dawood Ibrahim's extradition from Pakistan during the 2001-02 military crisis, there has been little hard evidence on where the mafia lord is holed up. In June, the Karachi-based newspaper The News reported that Dawood Ibrahim had shifted his base to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, after undergoing extensive plastic surgery. "The tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan, which were being searched for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, are now being combed for the man accused of the Mumbai blasts," The News asserted. As early as 2002, Indian intelligence reported that both Dawood Ibrahim and his second-in-command Shakeel Ahmad Babu were hidden at an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)-run safe house near Peshawar.

Pakistan's support for Dawood Ibrahim has long been evident. Shortly after the mafioso left Dubai for Karachi in the wake of the Mumbai serial bombings, he was issued a passport back-dated to August 12, 1991, bearing the number G-866537. Soon afterwards, he moved into a 6,000-square metre plot in the upmarket Clifton area of Karachi that had amenities such as a swimming pool, a gymnasium and a tennis court. Shakeel was gifted with a similar premises in the Defence Housing Authority enclave. Abdul Razzak `Tiger' Memon, the third author of the Mumbai serial bombings, purchased several properties, including the multi-storey Kashif Crown plaza situated on the Shara-e-Faisal boulevard.

When a Karachi residents' organisation protested against the encroachment of public space by the Memon family, it was told to mind its own business. "The ISI told us it is a Dawood Ibrahim building," a member of the organisation told Hasnain. "They said, this is a man who has done a lot for Pakistan, so we should not raise our voices," he added.

General Pervez Musharraf's regime threw its weight behind Ibrahim after taking power in 1999. "Dawood Ibrahim is not in Pakistan," Musharraf told former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani in July 2001. In a technical sense, he was right. With the help of two Singapore-based business associates of the mafia, Rakesh Tulshiyan, Shahid Sohail and Dawood Ibrahim had been moved to a safe house in Malaysia for a fortnight. He was housed, Indian intelligence sources say, in a property owned by Bukhari Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan national who is reported to have played a role in the smuggling of centrifuges used for enriching uranium.

If nothing else, this web of links demonstrates just how much protection Dawood Ibrahim's wealth has bought him. By mid-2002, he had made significant investments in Singapore, Malaysia, Kenya and Tanzania, routed through a web of front companies. Hasnain reported that "Dawood and his men have made heavy investments in prime properties in Karachi and Islamabad and are major players in the Karachi bourse and in the parallel credit system, or hundi. His businesses include gold and drug smuggling. The gang is also allegedly heavily involved in [cricket] match-fixing."

Wealth also purchased respectability. Last year, Dawood Ibrahim's daughter Mahrukh was married to former Pakistan cricket captain Javed Miandad's son. Although there has never been any charge that the two young people were in any way linked to the mafia, the elder Miandad's financial links with Dawood Ibrahim have often been commented on. Dawood Ibrahim is thought to have made substantial investments in businesses controlled by a prominent Karachi business family to whom Miandad is also related by marriage.

All of this wealth, though, came at a price: at the insistence of Pakistan's covert services, a percentage of the profits from his mafia operations were routed to the Islamist terror groups the ISI patronised. There is some evidence that these links were forged soon after 1993. Late that year, the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Front (JKIF) issued photographs of Tiger Memon along with its top commanders, taken at what the organisation claimed was a safe house in Srinagar. The JKIF photographs were intended to disprove Indian claims that the terrorist was in Pakistan. However, unknown to the JKIF leadership, one of its commanders was soon to defect to the Indian side. Usman Majid, now the Member of the Legislative Assembly from Bandipora, brought with him evidence that the photographs were taken at an ISI safe house in Muzaffarabad and provided the first accounts of how mafia money was helping to pay for terror operations in Jammu and Kashmir.

In October 2003 - a decade after the Mumbai bombings - the United States Department of Treasury finally designated Dawood Ibrahim a terrorist. The mafia lord, it recorded, was "involved in large-scale shipments of narcotics in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. The syndicate's smuggling routes from South Asia, the Middle East [West Asia] and Africa are shared with Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network. Successful routes established over recent years by Dawood Ibrahim's syndicate have been subsequently utilised by bin Laden. A financial arrangement was reportedly brokered to facilitate the latter's use of these routes. In the late 1990s, Dawood Ibrahim travelled in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban." The U.S. also charged him with funding "groups working against India, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba".

In a sense then, Dawood Ibrahim is in a prison: the prison all covert agents make for themselves, and from which they can exit only through death. Put simply, he knows too much about Pakistan's covert services to be allowed to ever stand trial anywhere in the world.

The tinkle of ice cubes hitting crystal and wafts of very expensive perfume greet patrons of the Harbour Bar at the Taj Mahal Hotel: the sounds and smells of Mumbai's ultra-rich. Inside this very hotel, on March 4, 1993, Tiger Memon shared with three core lieutenants his full plans for the serial bombings. He perhaps had a sentimental fondness for the Taj, for it was the sole Mumbai landmark of significance not chosen for destruction. At later meetings on March 9 and March 10, 33 men were assigned their targets and told how to go about bombing them.

Soon after the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, riots had broken out across Mumbai, culminating in some of India's worst-ever communal violence. Pitted against not just the armies of the Shiv Sena but also a communalised police force, Muslims across the city were subjected to a murderous onslaught. Soon after the killings began, Dawood Ibrahim called several key mafia leaders, including Yakub Memon, Ayub Memon, Dawood Mohammad Phansamiya and Mohammad Umar Dossa, to Dubai for discussions.

Accounts of what transpired in Dubai vary. Some insiders claim that Dawood Ibrahim was, against his own better judgment, pushed by Tiger Memon and other furious lieutenants into authorising the use of the mafia to avenge the communal violence. Others claim that pressure from the ground - from inner-city Muslims who had long believed mafia promises to protect them against Hindutva violence - compelled Dawood Ibrahim to act. Still others insist that the initiative for the action came from the ISI. Whatever the truth, a plan for terrorist strikes in Mumbai was in place at the end of the discussions in Dubai.

On January 9, 1993 - well before the communal carnage in Mumbai had ended - the first consignment of ISI-supplied weapons landed on a beach near the village of Dighi, on the Raigad coast. Dossa bribed customs officials and policemen to ensure that the consignment passed on to Mumbai safely. Indeed, the weapons travelled under the personal escort of Customs Inspector Jaywant Keshav Gaurav. The police intercepted the consignment at Gonghar Phata, near Shrivardhan - and then let it pass after accepting a bribe of Rs.700,000. Between February 2 and February 8, 1993, Phansamiya delivered more weapons, and the Research Department Explosive (RDX) eventually used in the bombings, on the Shekhadi coast.

Tiger Memon personally met with customs officials at the Big Splash Hotel in Raigad to ensure these consignments also reached Mumbai safely. Investigators later found that Additional Collector of Customs Somnath Thapa responded to specific intelligence warnings on the landings of explosives by asking his staff to keep a watch on a stretch of the coast he knew the mafia would not use.

Even as weapons and explosives were landing on the Maharashtra coast, Tiger Memon had begun sending mafia members to Pakistan to learn to use these resources. At least 27 men - according to the testimony of two among them, Usman Ahmad Jan Khan and Mohammad Umar Khatab - travelled to Dubai, using documents identifying them as workers for legitimate businesses with links to Dawood Ibrahim. From there, they were flown to Islamabad on Pakistan International Airlines, using visas provided on plain paper to avoid detection. At an ISI-run training camp, the men learned how to assemble explosives, use assault weapons and throw grenades.

India's external covert service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was eventually to rip the veil off the ISI's efforts to conceal the men's travel to Pakistan by obtaining passenger manifests documenting their arrival in Islamabad. Forensic evidence also emerged that proved that the grenades and detonators had been manufactured at Pakistani military-run facilities. At the time, though, no one in India's intelligence community knew what was going on. Maharashtra's police authorities, for their part, had chosen not to keep key members of the Dawood Ibrahim gang under close surveillance - a monumental failure that has yet to be accounted for.

Late on the night of March 11, Tiger Memon met with his key lieutenants for a last meeting at the al-Husseini Apartments on Dargah Street in Mahim. In a garage downstairs, bombs were being fitted into jeeps and scooters purchased for the attacks. Tiger Memon and his family left for Dubai early the next morning and flew on to Pakistan where they joined Dawood Ibrahim.

Most of the other key figures who planned and organised the bombings followed in their wake. The mafia foot-soldiers who executed the bombings dispersed within India, confident that their role in the terror strikes would never be detected. It was a terrible mistake - and one the ISI made sure was never repeated. In bombing after bombing since, terror groups have made enormous efforts to ensure that the perpetrators are out of the reach of Indian investigators within hours of the strike.

"I slept," said Abdul Gani Turk, in response to a question about what he did after planting the bomb that claimed 113 of the 227 people who died in the Mumbai serial bombings.

Successive governments have handled India's hunt for Dawood Ibrahim and Tiger Memon in much the same manner. India has made little serious effort to have the core perpetrators of the serial bombings extradited after 1994, even though credible evidence of their presence in Pakistan surfaced. Although their names figure on the list of 20 terrorists whose extradition India demanded in the wake of the 2001-02 military crisis with Pakistan, the calls were dropped once peace talks resumed.

Now, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has announced he intends to use the proposed joint intelligence mechanism India and Pakistan have agreed to set up to push for figures like Dawood Ibrahim to be handed over. Bar firm and serious action, though, the past record suggests the prospects of such an outcome are poor. Until then, no number of convictions will give the families of those killed on March 12, 1993, anything resembling closure.