NEW DELHI: Underworld don Abu Salem, who is wanted in connection with at least three cases in the Capital and presently lodged in a Mumbai jail, would be handed over to the Delhi police on February 8.

The Delhi police had been trying to secure Salem's custody since January last year. On several occasions, they produced production warrants in the Mumbai court concerned seeking his custody in an extortion case reported in July 2002. But the court had turned down their request, stating that Salem was required in the 1993 bomb blast case and also in other cases pending in various Mumbai courts.

Now that the Delhi police have been granted his custody with a condition to re-produce him in Mumbai on February 23, Salem would be formally arrested in the case in which he had allegedly demanded Rs.1 crore from one Rajat Nagrath, owner of Allied Communications in East of Kailash in South Delhi. In September 2002, the police had arrested Ishtiyaq, Sadiq and Salem's right hand man C. P. Rai in the same case.

During interrogation, the three had purportedly disclosed that they worked for Salem, who was then suspected to be operating from Dubai.

The police would question Salem for his role in another extortion call to Ashok Gupta, a Greater Kailash-based businessman, in which Rs. 5 crore was demanded from him as protection money in April 2002. In that case, the police had arrested five of his accomplices and booked them under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act. The third case also pertains to extortion.

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