By DPA,
Dhaka : Bangladeshi detectives Sunday arrested another member of an Indian underworld gang purportedly led by Kaskar Dawood Ibrahim, who is suspected of expanding a crime network in the country.
The police said they captured Arief Hussein, an Indian national, in a pre-dawn raid at a house in Mohammadpur outskirts of the city where he had been residing for the last nine years.
“We suspect Arief, a member of the gang, was linked with a number of killings in India,” Mahbub Alam, a deputy commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police said, adding that Arief fled India after he was accused in the murder of a Mumbai businessman in 2000.
Since his arrival in Dhaka, Arief has been operating under Chhota Shakil, the second-in-command of Dawood Ibrahim’s gang, wanted by the Indian government and the Interpol, police said.
He was in charge of recruiting members of the gang in Bangladesh, police said.
On May 27, the police arrested Abdur Rouf Merchant, a convicted killer of Indian music magnate Gulshan Kumar, and Jahid Sheikh, an aide of Mumbai mafia boss Dawood Ibrahim, at eastern Brahmanbaria district.
Arief was trying to arrange legal defence to get the two released from custody, a police officer said.
After the capture of Merchant, police said, Dawood Ibrahim sent his aides apparently to expand his criminal network in Bangladesh.
Merchant was sent to Bangladesh by Dawood Ibrahim, city police chief A.S.M. Shahidul Islam said. He was suspected of links with a smuggling case involving 10 truckloads of weapons that were seized by the police at Bangladesh’s prime Chittagong port in 2004.