By Mayank Chhaya, IANS
Chicago : The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it would like suspected Indian crime boss Dawood Ibrahim to be arrested, but it is not clear if the agency has officially sought his custody.
“The FBI would like to see the arrest of Dawood Ibrahim,” Special Agent Richard Kolko, who is unit chief at the FBI’s National Press Office, told IANS.
Kolko was responding to questions in the aftermath of media speculation that Dawood Ibrahim may have been arrested in Pakistan.
The FBI official did not comment on the reports nor did he respond to a question if Pakistan might have acted under mounting US pressure.
Asked what the US was pursuing Dawood Ibrahim for, Kolko said: “The US Department of the Treasury designated him a ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ on Oct 16, 2003. (Dawood) Ibrahim has shared his smuggling routes with Al Qaeda and funded attacks by anti-Western Islamic groups. He is also accused of masterminding the 1993 Bombay bombings.”
Kolko added: “(Dawood) Ibrahim’s criminal syndicate aids terrorist groups ranging from Al Qaeda to Lashkar-e-Taiba.”
In the past four years since he was named a specially designated global terrorist, not much has been heard about Dawood Ibrahim within the US.
His emergence on the US radar has been a gradual, almost tentative process. Notwithstanding his designation, Dawood Ibrahim is not considered a particularly high value target.
If at all Dawood Ibrahim is being quietly held by the Pakistani authorities, the primary motivation for Islamabad could be to offer any scalp to a restive Washington.
There is a perception among experts that Pakistan cannot possibly hand over Dawood Ibrahim and at the same time play the innocent saying it never harboured him. Handing him over even via Kazakhstan would be an implicit admission that they knew all along where he was.
While Dawood Ibrahim may not be a high value target for the US, his alleged role as a facilitator to Al Qaeda and other terror networks is likely to keep him in Washington’s crosshairs. There is nothing to indicate whether, if and when Pakistan arrests him, the US would in fact seek his custody.
Not much is known about the specific anti-Western attacks he is accused of having funded. Other than the general belief that Dawood Ibrahim could have sought to give his criminal enterprise some ideological underpinning by reportedly helping out Al Qaeda, not much is known about his motivations.
As far as crime sagas go, Dawood Ibrahim’s has been a spectacular rise. In the early 1980s he was but an underling on the margins of the Mumbai underworld controlled by the likes of Haji Mastan, Varadaraja Mudaliar and Karim Lala.
The irony of him being a son of a police constable crossing over to the wrong side of the law was a source of some mirth among the mob bosses then. However, many established names did see early signs of a powerful crime career in him.
In a rare unguarded moment, Haji Mastan once told this writer: “Yeh ladka (Ibrahim) kuch bada karega. (This young man will do something big).”
Not wanting to commit himself to whether he meant something in the world of crime, Mastan did not specify any particular career path but it was understood what he was implying.