Dawood Ibrahim and the other terrorists wanted by India for last week's Mumbai attacks “do not exist in Pakistan”: the Indians should search for them elsewhere in South Asia and Singapore and Hong Kong.That’s what the Pakistani High Commissioner in London, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, told the BBC World Service on Newshour today. Click on BBC World Service to listen to the broadcast.
Dawood Ibrahim’s former deputy –- and later, rival –- Chota Rajan fled to Bangkok, where he survived an assassination attempt, during a gang war between them in 2000.Ganesh Gaitonde, Mumbai's fictional gang lord in Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra's 2006 epic novel, survives a similar assassination attempt in Singapore.
India has demanded Pakistan hand over Indian underworld boss Dawood Ibrahim and the Pakistani Muslim cleric, Maulana Masood Azhar, as well as 18 other terrorists suspected of being involved in last week’s Mumbai terrorist attacks, which left more than 180 people dead.
Masood Azhar, chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorist group, was imprisoned in India in 1994 but released in 1999 in exchange for passengers aboard an Indian Airlines plane that was hijacked to Kandahar in Afghanistan, which was then under Taliban control.
Dawood Ibrahim masterminded the 1993 Mumbai blasts which killed about 250 people and is believed to have links with al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden
In 2003, Dawood Ibrahim was declared a “global terrorist” by Washington, which urged all UN member states to seize his assets and ban his entry. The underworld boss is also wanted by Interpol.
But he is believed to have links with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service and lived “like a king” in a “palatial home” in Karachi, said the Pakistani magazine Newsline in 2001.
The US and Interpol directives issued against him list his last known address in Karachi and the various passports he has used over the years. Click on the links to see his photos, passport details, physical features — 1.67 metres, mole on left eyebrow — and his last known address, White House, near the Saudi Mosque, in the posh district of Clifton in Karachi. Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari's assassinated wife Benazir Bhutto also had her ancestral home in Clifton.
Dawood Ibrahim shares his birthday with China’s late chairman Mao Zedong and will be 53 on December 26 this year.
His daughter got married to former Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad’s son in a lavish ceremony in Dubai in 2005, but he was not seen at the wedding, reported the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn.
Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company crime syndicate, headquartered in Karachi, still dominates the Mumbai underworld, according to Misha Glenny, author of McMafia: Crime without Frontiers. “India's security services have begun investigating Dawood's possible role in the Mumbai attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India's great commercial centre,” Glenny wrote in the Guardian.
.
Related posts:
