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Introduction: All US assets frozen, UN alert follows * Indian, US agencies find his Osama ‘link’
This is what New Delhi has been waiting for a very very long time.
The US Treasury Department tonight announced that Dawood Ibrahim alias Sheikh Dawood Hassan is a ‘‘specially designated global terrorist’’ with a Pak passport and a Karachi address.
Washington will now request the United Nations to list the mafia don in pursuance of relevant Security Council resolutions. The designation freezes all assets of Dawood Ibrahim within the US. And the UN listing will require that all member states freeze Dawood’s assets and impose a travel ban.
In one stroke, not only does this nail Pakistan’s lie and put its President General Pervez Musharraf under pressure to deliver Dawood—one of the 20 most wanted by India—it also puts the terrorist label on the D-company and its network in South- Asia, especially the Mumbai underworld.
What will make Islamabad run for cover is that Dawood’s address in the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the Treasury Department is shown as Karachi, Pakistan.
His phone number is 021-5892038
and his passport issued by the Pakistani government is G 869537. That the
US knows Dawood is based in Pakistan is contrary to Musharraf’s stand before
the Indian government during the Agra 2001 summit that he had not taken
refuge in his country.
The designation of Dawood as terrorist by Washington comes after close collaboration between Indian and US investigative agencies which, sources said, has found that:
* Dawood was involved in large-scale shipments of narcotics in the United Kingdom and Western Europe.
* In the late 1990s, he travelled to Afghanistan under the protection of the radical Taliban government. His syndicate is said to have shared smuggling routes from South Asia, the Middle-East and Africa with bin Laden and his terrorist network.
* A ‘‘financial arrangement” was reportedly brokered between Dawood and Osama to facilitate the latter’s using these routes.
* Washington has information, as recent as fall of 2002, indicating that Dawood financially supported Islamic militant groups working against India such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT).
* Incidentally, the US added Lashkar to its list of foreign terrorist outfits in October 2001. The Lashkar, which is the armed wing of Markaz-ud-Dawa-wal- Irshad, was banned by Pakistan and its assets frozen in January 2002.
While Islamabad has consistently denied Dawood’s presence in Pakistan, last month the don’s cover was blown when de facto Sindh Home Minister Aftab Sheikh went on record saying that Dawood had a network from Mumbai to Karachi and ‘‘was working in both the countries’’.
The Inspector General of Sindh Police also confirmed that a recent bomb blast at a Karachi business centre—Kawish Crown Plaza—was ‘‘ostensibly owned by one Ahmed Jamal ... but actually belonged to Dawood Ibrahim’’.
There was speculation in the Pakistan press that this leak could have been deliberate since Musharraf has been feeling the heat on the issue for quite a while and this could have been the General’s only face- saver.
Dawood, the son of a police constable, has reigned as one of the pre-eminent criminals in the Mumbai underworld, for the past two decades.
He is currently wanted in India for the March 1993 Bombay serial blasts that killed more than 200 persons and injured over 1,000.
Top sources in the government said they were aware of Dawood’s designation as a terrorist and the announcement was to be made along with the blacklisting of the Al-Akhtar trust, set up by Jaish-e-Mohammed’s Masood Azhar.
While the trust was designated as
a ‘‘terrorist support organisation’’ by the US Treasury Department on Tuesday,
Dawood was put on the US blacklist only tonight.
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