SPECIAL REPORTS

BOMBAY BLASTS

The Conspiracy Unravels

In piecing together the plot, investigators confirm the key part played by Dawood Ibrahim and find that Pakistan's role went way beyond merely training the saboteurs
By M. R A H M A N and RAHUL PATHAK

HREE months after a series of bombs rained fire and death over Bombay, the smoke-screen that had hung over the conspiracy is beginning to lift. The officials who had spent their days and nights scratching for evidence and sifting for clues are now getting a glimpse of not just the mechanics of the operation but its logistics and planning as well. And as the evidence gathered by the Bombay Police is woven into the mass of information lying with the intelligence agencies, many of the theories which were bandied about immediately after the blasts need to be radically revised. j[ The explosives were neither American left-overs in Afghanistan, nor surplus stock in the Pakistani bomb-yards. Dawood Ibrahim was not merely a shadowy figure pulling remote strings from distant shores, but an active participant in the operation. The conspiracy, investigators now surmise, was aimed at stirring up communal violence and polarising the country. It was a Pakistani national who arranged for the RDX consignment that devastated Bombay, from an Austrian company. The bomb blasts were actually planned to take place in late April around Shivaji Jayanti, but Tiger Memon

advanced the operation to March 12. These chunks of information are the intangible gains of an intensive investigation. The tangible trophies are no less impressive. The Bombay Police has already arrested 103 people involved in the blasts and seized enough arsenal to equip an army platoon63 AK-56 rifles, 40,000 rounds of ammunition, over 450 hand grenades, more than 3.5 tonnes of RDX plastic explosive and 1,100 detonators. Their counterparts in the Maharashtra State Police have, simultaneously, arrested 70 people, including some policemen and customs officials for their involvement in the landing of explosives and weapons on the Konkan coast. New revelations have surfaced following the arrest of two key conspirators. They are Mulchand Shah, a major havala operator through whom Memon procured his funds, and Mohammed Usman, an exporter who, investigators say, is part of the inner circle of saboteurs. Shah admits arranging Rs 6 crore from abroad for Memon to set his scheme rolling. Apart from Bombay, Surat and cities in Uttar Pradesh were also targeted for bomb attacks. Says Amarjeet Singh Samra, police commissioner of Bombay: "We now have a much clearer picture of the entire operation. It basically involved a

NEW FINDINGS
ti A smuggler arrested for the blasts has admitted that he was taken by Tiger Memon to Dubai to meet Dawood for instructions on landing the explosives. I 2. Interpol has traced the origin of the RDX to an Austrian firm. The mart who arranged the consignment has been identified as a Pakistani who once worked for the Austrian firm. 4, The RDX never landed in Dubai but was trans-shipped 30 km off the Pakistan coast to Raigad. A senior customs official involved was arrested. 5. Grenades that arrived for rioting were made by a Pakistani firm. <S Memon's three gang members, who had the charge of executing the blasts, have been identified. They fled via Nepal. Twelve detained persons have provided details of training in Pakistan for the operation. They were among the 35 who went there. - The havala operator who transferred funds to finance the blasts from abroad has been arrested. 9. The wider conspiracy was aimed at arming saboteurs with weapons and grenades to systematically organise riots and kill VVIPS. 1O. Detailed information has been passed on to the US for the purpose of getting Pakistan declared a terrorist state.

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hardcore group led by Tiger Memon, and a larger peripheral group responsible for financing, transporting, and so on." Usman has testified that the first landing of AK-56 rifles and hand-grenades took place on January 9 in Raigad district, south of Bombay along with a consignment of silver. This was the time when unprecedented communal violence sponsored by the Shiv Sena was at its height. The Sainiks were exacting revenge for the killing of Hindus on the streets of Muslim-majority areas by gangsters acting as agents provocateurs. This was exactly the way that Memon's gang and their foreign sponsors wanted and, indeed, expected them to react in anticipation of a wider communal backlash throughout the country.

N another breakthrough, the police have picked up 10 men involved in the provocative killings on January 6 and 7. Says Samra: "In January, the conspirators made a much smaller investment (of arms and violence), but the Sainiks who rioted played right into their hands.'' Encouraged by the response, the conspirators were fully confident of the outcome of their grand strike in which they wanted to sabotage oil, naval and government installations and eliminate various VIPS once the communal disturbances they anticipated had begun. The conspirators moved on two frontsarranging for the explosives and recruiting the saboteurs. Simultaneously, firearms were being smuggled to follow the explosions with an even deadlier result in the guise of rioting. Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim worked in tandem to ensure that everything went smoothly. The original theory was that the RDX used in Bombay was of Czech or US origin. It was analysed without much hope, as establishing either of these brands would have proved nothing. There is so much of these two brands in circulation that it would have been impossible to trace the particular consignment and the route it took to Bombay. Unexpectedly, with Interpol's help, the investigators struck gold. When an explosive is analysed on a spectograph. it shows different 'bands' and 'ribbons' for each manufacturer. These are like fingerprints that can only belong to a particular brand. The manufacturers can distort or erase these 'ribbons' in the explosive to muddy the trail when they are used for covert and clandestine operations. The fingerprint of the RDX used in Bombay stood out loud and clear. This particular brand had come from an Austrian manufacturer, according to investigators. As it turned out, the consignment had been contracted by a Pakistani national who, investigators found, is a former employee of the company. A fake end-user certificate had been used to dupe the Austrian company into believing that the RDX was being used for some other purpose. Once the explosive had been obtained, it had to be smuggled into India.

Anwar Ahmed and..,

...Javed Chikna...

...executed the blasts

It was at this point that Dawood Ibrahim chose to step out of the shadows and supervise the operation himself. Daud Phanse from Raigad district, a landing agent for contraband goods, has admitted that Tiger Memon personally took him to Dubai to meet Dawood. Phanse, who is in his 40s, says the meeting took place in January. The underworld boss instructed him to arrange for the landing of explosives at Shekadi village in February. "Humko bhi kuch karke dikhana hai (We too have to do something)," Dawood is reported to have said. It was Phanse's first and only meeting with Dawood, and since he is not a major figure in the smuggling world in any way, it remains a mystery why he should have been specially summoned to Dubai. Said a police officer: "Phanse isn't even educated and it isn't clear why Dawood should want to meet him. But he did identify Dawood as the man he met in Dubai from photographs we showed him." Home Ministry officials handling the investigation say that Dawood's motives are clearer now. "With his money and muscle, he fancied himself as the protector of his community. When it was targeted during the riots, his name was mud. He had to somehow regain his pride, even it if was at the expense of losing his investments in the country," says a senior official. Investigators had initially thought that the explosive came to Raigad via Dubai. And they were intrigued that the authorities therewho are paranoid about anything bigger than a firecrackershould have allowed tonnes of RDX to be stored. It now turns out that the explosives never touched Dubai at all. The consignment was handed over to the saboteurs in a mid-sea operation in February, about 30 km off the Pakistani coast. The conspirators certainly did not leave anything to chance. A secret conference was held in the first week of February. Among those who attended the meeting were Tiger Memon and a senior customs officer, who has since been arrested. But, investigators say, the key figure who had sneaked into Bombay for an evening to finalise the details of the operation was none other than Dawood Ibrahim himself. However, one crucial bitthe actual date when the bombs exploded was not according to the original plan. After prolonged interrogation of suspects, the police learned that the blasts were actually meant to coincide with Shivaji Jayanti on April 24. But Memon advanced the date by several weeks. One reason for this, say investigators, is that Gul Mohammed

Apart from Bombay, ^ Surat and Uttar ^ Pradesh were t also on the K saboteurs' --' hit list.

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SPECIAL

REPORTS
ASHESH SHAH

Noor Mohammed Shaikh, a young marble-shop owner who underwent training in Pakistan, suffered qualms about being part of a violent conspiracy and surrendered himself to the police on March 9. But Gul Mohammed did not know details of the RDX planhe was only told that he could retaliate (his family had suffered in the January riots) in a fresh surge of violence.

HANSE was one of the landing agents for the RDX, which was offloaded from a high-speed boat anchored off the coast for over two nights, since the vehicles brought by Tiger Memon were not enough to carry all the explosives the first night. "We estimate that 7,000 kg of RDX may have been brought in on the basis of descriptions given by people who did the landing. This may not necessarily be true, though. But at least 4,000 kg has been accounted for in the police seizures and the explosions, and we've put tremendous pressure to fish out anything more which might be there," observed M.N. Singh, joint commissioner (crime), who headed the Worli went off just after their Bombay CID investigation. maroon Maruti van passed Meanwhile, the recruit"A core group the Regional Passport Office, ment and training were also of 20, led by Tiger smashing its rear windowgoing according to plan. pane and exposing the arms About 35 men, whose famMemon, carried out cache inside. The gangsters ilies and businesses were the the operation." targets of communal viopanicked and abandoned the vehicle, which led the police lence, were taken to IslamA.S. SAMRA straight to Memon's flat the abad via Dubai in February. Police Commissioner They skipped immigration same night. Memon had already fled and customs at Islamabad the country along with 11 airport, and were taken in a other members of his family. black-curtained vehicle into The investigators have estabthe hills about two hours from the Pakistani capital. They lived in tents and were lished that the final execution of the conspiracy was left in the given intensive training in the use of RDX and small arms hands of three trusted aides: Anwar Ahmed Haji Theiba, 32; Javed Da wood Patel alias Javed Chikna, 33; and Mohd Shafi for about a week. The instructors were two bearded men dressed in salwar- Kassim Memon, also in his 30s. Theiba, the police believe, is kameez who spoke Urdu with a Punjabi accent. Some sightsee- virtually Tiger Memon's shadow, accompanying him everying was also thrown in for the groupa visit to Murree hill where and even doubling as his bodyguard, while Javed and station and to the famed King Faisal mosque in Islamabad. The Shafi were important operatives in Tiger's smuggling racket. All three, along with at least six other co-conspirators, are police have arrested and interrogated 12 of the 35 men who went to Pakistan and are now reasonably convinced of their suspected to have fled the country via Nepal, where Dawood has major investments and commands significant influence. detailed accounts of the trip. Everything worked with clockwork precision. The gre- Interestingly, the men arrested last week belong to an entirely nades and rifles had arrived and were waiting to be distributed different gang, indicating that the conspiracy was not merely during the rioting that should inevitably have followed. The limited to the Memons in Bombay's underworld. "The planning and execution of the conspiracy has been grenades were marked 'UP'. This stands for Ulbricht Pakistan, which is a private weapons company in Pakistan with fully uncovered. As for the master-minds abroad, we will get details from them only when we get the chance to interrogate Austrian collaboration. Tiger had decided to let his men provide the first spark for them," says DGP S. Ramamurthi. For the moment, there seems the riots. Even as the blasts were ripping across the metropolis little chance of that. In any case, the investigators are now saddled with a job on March 12, seven gangsters armed with rifles and hand grenades were heading south from Mahim, where the that goes way beyond merely unravelling the plot and Memons lived and from where they planned the entire catching the culprits. Two other responsibilities have been operation, to the Bombay Municipal Corporation on a raid- ladled onto their plate. One is to somehow convince the US and-kill mission. But providentially, the massive bomb at that enough evidence exists to declare Pakistan a terrorist

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state. The second is to launch a drive against the underworld on the basis of the huge amount of peripheral information that such a thorough probe has generated. US officials have been given a sneak preview of the interrogation reports of the men who went to Pakistan for training. They have been told of the involvement of a Pakistani national in obtaining the explosives. They have also been shown a list of seizures and told that these arms could not have come in without Pakistan's help, just as the saboteurs could not have sneaked past the immigration counter at Karachi airport without official connivance. The Americans admit that the evidence is significant and they, in turn, have passed on information about various Islamic fundamentalist groups in West Asia who sponsor terrorism. But the US authorities are still not convinced that the Pakistani government is directly involved and not just its citizens in their individual capacity. The investigators still have not been able to establish a connection between the Pakistani national who made arrangements for the RDX, and the isi. The testimony of those who were trained in Pakistan has been dismissed because the US believes that interrogation reports can be cooked up. And the absence of entry stamps on their passports at Karachi has been pooh-poohed because the US claims that Pakistani airports are notoriously lax in such matters. The Government is now looking for irrefutable evidence such as the source of funding for the operationto nail Pakistan. The interstate and international dimensions of the conspiracy have been cited as a reason for handing over the probe to the CBI. The Bombay Police, however, dismiss this as "a political matter" not rt ally relevant to the progress of the ongoing investigation. The police probe has been conducted with the full cooperation of the CBI, the IB, RAW, and other state police forces. A ND it in no way prevents the CBI t-\m pursuing suspects and leads JL JL elsewhere in the country or abroad. Adds M.N. Singh: "The Bombay Police have visited 80 places in 15 states, and quite a few of the 103 arrests were from outside the city. In fact, the blast investigation has helped us launch a drive against the underworld." And this aspect of the probe has resulted in several "encounter"' deaths in Bombay. In just two months, 14 people have been shot dead, against 16 such deaths during the whole of last year. The One of the encounter deaths are mostly from Dawood Ibrahim's gang, as police maintain that gangsters from the other two major underworld groups led by Arun Gawli and Amar Naik now tend to surrender rather than open fire. The men arrested in the bomb blast conspiracy have also surrendered without a fight. But the city-wide police crackdown has resulted in an unintended fallout which has the potential for serious, longterm damage. There are allegations that the police detained scores of people, including women and children, for varying periods without formally arresting them as required under the law, and assaulted several of them in a bid to extract information about their relatives or friends who are on

the wanted list. Even after being let off, they were asked to report regularly to police stations, something which k only a court can order. Some victims have filed petitions in the high court against their illegal detention and continued harassment by the police. What's worse, there are charges that policemen not necessarily connected with the probe are now involved in a widespread extortion racket, with money being extracted from Muslims on threat of arrest and implication in the bomb conspiracy. Says a noted advocate, P.A. Sebastian, who is the secretary of the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights: "Last week alone, six Malayali Muslims from Nagpada told me that they had to pay up to Rs 15,000 each to avoid being locked up and beaten. The amount can be as high as Rs 1 lakh if richer people are targeted.'' Added a prominent social worker, Sushoba Barwe: "If the charges are true, it's very worrying, since it'll only alienate the Muslims further." After a lull created by the demand for a CBI takeover of the blasts probe, the police investigation is back on steam. "It

The USis still V not convinced \t Pakistan's role was on an official level.

accused in the case being taken into police custody looks like we'll continue to be in charge of the case," says Samra. But with the top-level conspirators safely ensconced abroad, the police can only hope to pick up secondary hoodlums and extract more information on the entire criminal enterprise. And they seem in no hurry yet to file chargesheets against the accused in court. Meanwhile, with communal tension in the city rising after the sensational murders of two legislators. Chief Minister Sharad Pawar and Samra have to worry once again about maintaining peace and thwarting the foreign-inspired conspiracy to spread murder and mayhem in India'sfinancialcapital.