MUMBAI: Indian security agencies hope that the terrorist attack in New York on Tuesday will see the U.S. put pressure on Pakistan to extradite Dawood Ibrahim, Tiger Memon, Chhota Shakeel and others, who masterminded the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in March 1993.
"For the past seven years the Indian government has been seeking U.S. assistance in getting Pakistan to handover Dawood and his henchmen, but Washington has not evinced sufficient interest in the matter. Wehope that now there will be a change in the U.S response and it will compel the Pervez Musharraf military regime to zero in on Dawood and his gang who are holed up in Karachi. This has to be done swiftly before they escape to Saudi Arabia or some such country," a senior police official told The Times of India. However, another official said that Islamabad would prefer to let Dawood and his team escape from the country rather than extradite them to India, since the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) has actively collaborated with them in executing the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. "If we have Dawood, Memon and their associates in our custody then we will have a wealth of information about the exact role played by the ISI in the blasts," an intelligence official observed.
Sources said that in the past few years, the CIA has been cooperating with Indian security agencies in gathering information about Pan-Islamic terrorists groups operating in Kashmir, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For example, the Mumbai police was able to track down the associates of the Pakistani terrorists, who hijacked an Indian Airlines airplane from Kathmandu to Kandahar on December 24, 1999, principally because of intelligence provided by the CIA. The American agency traced a phone call made by the hijackers in Kandahar to a number in suburban Mumbai. The information was passed on to the Indian government and in a brilliant operation, a police team led by the then joint police commissioner D. Sivanandan arrested the associates of the terrorists.
Sources said that it is high time
that the threat posed by the Dawood Ibrahim gang is faced head on by the
Central and Maharashtra governments. "Dawood is no more a Mumbai gangster
taking shelter in Karachi. As the Pakistani magazine Newsline has
stated, he is now working for the government in Islamabad. The magazine
has stated that Dawood and his men in India are now doing espionage for
the Pakistani government. This has serious security implications for India,"
as assistant commissioner observed. However, another officer said,
Dawood was now virtually a prisoner of the ISI who has to do the spy agency's
bidding.