The Hindu : From Mumbai to Karachi

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 23, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

From Mumbai to Karachi

AN UNWITTING ADMISSION? A calculated leak? A misquoted remark? The exact reasons why two Pakistan officials drew attention to Dawood Ibrahim's business interests in Karachi are far from clear. Not surprisingly though, the statements they reportedly made about the operations of the underworld don have created a flutter in India, where they are perceived as the first official admission of Dawood Ibrahim's presence in Pakistan. A recent issue of a Pakistani magazine, Herald, quoted the Inspector General of Police of the Sindh province as saying that a Karachi building, which was the target of a bomb blast, belonged to Dawood Ibrahim. The article went on to add that the IGP's statement was endorsed by Aftab Sheikh, the Senior Adviser to the Home Ministry of Sindh, who reportedly said the underworld don had an empire that was active in both Mumbai and Karachi. Mr. Sheikh has since claimed he was misquoted by the magazine, but the article in the Herald has raised inevitable questions about Islamabad's apparent willingness to provide both refuge and patronage to criminals wanted in India.

As the main accused in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, Dawood Ibrahim is arguably India's most wanted man. Pakistan has denied sheltering the mafia don and has refused New Delhi's repeated requests for his deportation on the ground that "no such person lives in Pakistan". However, Islamabad's duplicity about the patronage it extends to criminals and terrorists from this country has been exposed from time to time — and not by the international press or the Indian intelligence agencies alone. Two years ago, it was the Pakistani magazine Newsline which identified the bungalow in which Dawood Ibrahim lived and revealed how he and his so-called D-company received official protection "using fake names but genuine Pakistani passports and identity cards provided by the Government for services rendered to Pakistan". The recent article in the Herald makes out that the mafia don runs an extensive financial and criminal network in Karachi. Moreover, it suggests that the provincial authorities are getting increasingly worried about this. They have good reason to. In recent times, Karachi has witnessed a number of terrorist attacks. Last year, the bomb blast in the U.S. consulate building claimed many lives and forced it to move, for security reasons, to an "undisclosed destination". A similar attack outside a hotel where the New Zealand cricket team was staying resulted in the Kiwis calling off their tour.

It was only a couple of days ago that another blast led the South African cricket team to call off its tour. The recent violence in Karachi has fuelled apprehensions about the growing influence of radical groups, with possible links to Al-Qaeda. However, the references to Dawood Ibrahim by the two Sindh officials in the Herald were made in the context of two bomb attacks on commercial buildings in Karachi. It is possible that by drawing attention, perhaps unwittingly, to the involvement of Ibrahim, the Sindh officials were only stressing that these attacks were a result of rivalry between criminal gangs and therefore unconnected to Al-Qaeda or other global terrorist networks. The Herald story, which went almost unnoticed before it was picked up and highlighted by the Indian news agencies, came on the eve of the departure of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to New York for the U.N. General Assembly session. India's case that the 20 criminals it has listed be deported by Pakistan will be strengthened by what is another round of revelations about the country's most wanted man.

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