SPECIAL REPORTS

BOMBAY BLASTS The Conspiracy Unravels

In piecing together the plot, investigators confirm the key part played by and find that Pakistan's role went way beyond merely training the saboteurs

advanced the operation to March 12. By M. RAHMAN and RAHUL PATHAK These chunks of information are the intangible gains of an HREE months after a series of bombs rained fire and intensive investigation. The tangible trophies are no less death over Bombay, the smoke-screen that had hung impressive. The Bombay Police has already arrested 103 Tover the conspiracy is beginning to lift. The officials who people involved in the blasts and seized enough arsenal to had spent their days and nights scratching for evidence and equip an army platoon—63 AK-56 rifles, 40,000 rounds of sifting for clues are now getting a glimpse of not just the ammunition, over 450 hand grenades, more than 3.5 tonnes mechanics of the operation but its logistics and planning as of RDX plastic explosive and 1,100 detonators. Their counter- well. And as the evidence gathered by the Bombay Police is parts in the State Police have, simultaneously, woven into the mass of information lying with the intelligence arrested 70 people, including some policemen and customs agencies, many of the theories which were bandied about officials for their involvement in the landing of explosives and immediately after the blasts need to be radically revised. weapons on the Konkan coast. j[ The explosives were neither American left-overs in Af- New revelations have surfaced following the arrest of two ghanistan, nor surplus stock in the Pakistani bomb-yards. key conspirators. They are Mulchand Shah, a major havala Dawood Ibrahim was not merely a shadowy figure pulling operator through whom Memon procured his funds, and remote strings from distant shores, but an active participant in Mohammed Usman, an exporter who, investigators say, is the operation. The conspiracy, investigators now surmise, part of the inner circle of saboteurs. Shah admits arranging was aimed at stirring up communal violence and polarising Rs 6 crore from abroad for Memon to set his scheme rolling. the country. It was a Pakistani national who arranged for the Apart from Bombay, Surat and cities in Uttar Pradesh were RDX consignment that devastated Bombay, from an Austrian also targeted for bomb attacks. Says Amarjeet Singh Samra, company. The bomb blasts were actually planned to take police commissioner of Bombay: "We now have a much place in late April around Shivaji Jayanti, but Tiger Memon 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.

42 INDIAT hardcore group led by Tiger Memon, and a larger peripheral It was at Apart from Bombay, group responsible for financing, transporting, and so on." this point that Usman has testified that the first landing of AK-56 rifles Dawood Ibra- ^ Surat and Uttar and hand-grenades took place on January 9 in Raigad district, him chose to step south of Bombay along with a consignment of silver. This out of the shadows and ^ Pradesh were was the time when unprecedented communal violence spon- supervise the opera- t also on the sored by the was at its height. The Sainiks were tion himself. exacting revenge for the killing of Hindus on the streets Daud Phanse from Raigad K saboteurs' of Muslim-majority areas by gangsters acting as agents pro- district, a landing agent for contra- vocateurs. This was exactly the way that Memon's gang and band goods, has admitted that Tiger --'• hit list. their foreign sponsors wanted and, indeed, expected them to Memon personally took him to Dubai to react in anticipation of a wider communal backlash through- meet Dawood. Phanse, who is in his 40s, out the country. says the meeting took place in January. The underworld boss instructed him to arrange for N another breakthrough, the police have picked up 10 men the landing of explosives at Shekadi village in involved in the provocative killings on January 6 and 7. Says February. "Humko bhi kuch karke dikhana hai (We too ISamra: "In January, the conspirators made a much smaller have to do something)," Dawood is reported to have said. It investment (of arms and violence), but the Sainiks who rioted was Phanse's first and only meeting with Dawood, and since played right into their hands.'' Encouraged by the response, the he is not a major figure in the smuggling world in any way, it conspirators were fully confident of the outcome of their grand remains a mystery why he should have been specially strike in which they wanted to sabotage oil, naval and summoned to Dubai. Said a police officer: "Phanse isn't even government installations and eliminate various VIPS once the educated and it isn't clear why Dawood should want to meet communal disturbances they anticipated had begun. him. But he did identify Dawood as the man he met in Dubai The conspirators moved on two fronts—arranging for from photographs we showed him." the explosives and recruiting the saboteurs. Simultaneous- Home Ministry officials handling the investigation say ly, firearms were being smuggled to that Dawood's motives are clearer now. follow the explosions with an even "With his money and muscle, he fancied deadlier result in the guise of rioting. Anwar Ahmed and.., himself as the protector of his commu- Tiger Memon and Dawood Ibrahim nity. When it was targeted during the worked in tandem to ensure that every- riots, his name was mud. He had to thing went smoothly. somehow regain his pride, even it if was The original theory was that the RDX at the expense of losing his investments used in Bombay was of Czech or US in the country," says a senior official. origin. It was analysed without much Investigators had initially thought hope, as establishing either of these that the explosive came to Raigad via brands would have proved nothing. Dubai. And they were intrigued that the There is so much of these two brands authorities there—who are paranoid in circulation that it would have about anything bigger than a fire- been impossible to trace the particu- cracker—should have allowed tonnes of lar consignment and the route it took RDX to be stored. It now turns out that to Bombay. the explosives never touched Dubai at Unexpectedly, with Interpol's help, all. The consignment was handed over the investigators struck gold. When an to the saboteurs in a mid-sea opera- explosive is analysed on a spectograph. tion in February, about 30 km off the it shows different 'bands' and 'ribbons' Pakistani coast. for each manufacturer. These are like The conspirators certainly did not fingerprints that can only belong to a ...Javed Chikna... leave anything to chance. A secret con- particular brand. The manufacturers ference was held in the first week of can distort or erase these 'ribbons' in February. Among those who attended the explosive to muddy the trail when the meeting were Tiger Memon and a they are used for covert and clandes- senior customs officer, who has since tine operations. been arrested. But, investigators say, the The fingerprint of the RDX used key figure who had sneaked into Bom- in Bombay stood out loud and clear. bay for an evening to finalise the details This particular brand had come from of the operation was none other than an Austrian manufacturer, according Dawood Ibrahim himself. to investigators. As it turned out, the However, one crucial bit—the ac- consignment had been contracted by a tual date when the bombs exploded— Pakistani national who, investigators was not according to the original plan. found, is a former employee of the After prolonged interrogation of sus- company. A fake end-user certificate pects, the police learned that the blasts had been used to dupe the Austrian were actually meant to coincide with company into believing that the RDX was Shivaji Jayanti on April 24. being used for some other purpose. But Memon advanced the date by Once the explosive had been ob- several weeks. One reason for this, say tained, it had to be smuggled into . ...executed the blasts investigators, is that Gul Mohammed

43 SPECIAL REPORTS

ASHESH SHAH Noor Mohammed Shaikh, a young mar- ble-shop owner who underwent train- ing 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 plan—he 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 off- Ploaded 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 descrip- tions given by people who did the land- ing. 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 tremen- dous pressure to fish out anything more which might be there," observ- ed M.N. Singh, joint commissioner (crime), who headed the Bombay CID investigation. Worli went off just after their Meanwhile, the recruit- "A core group maroon Maruti van passed ment and training were also the Regional Passport Office, going according to plan. of 20, led by Tiger smashing its rear window- About 35 men, whose fam- Memon, carried out pane and exposing the arms ilies and businesses were the cache inside. The gangsters targets of communal vio- the operation." panicked and abandoned the lence, were taken to Islam- vehicle, which led the police abad via Dubai in February. A.S. SAMRA straight to Memon's flat the They skipped immigration Police Commissioner same night. and customs at Islamabad Memon had already fled airport, and were taken in a the country along with 11 black-curtained vehicle into other members of his family. the hills about two hours The investigators have estab- 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; for about a week. Javed Da wood Patel alias Javed Chikna, 33; and Mohd Shafi 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 every- ing was also thrown in for the group—a 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. police have arrested and interrogated 12 of the 35 men who All three, along with at least six other co-conspirators, are went to Pakistan and are now reasonably convinced of their suspected to have fled the country via Nepal, where Dawood detailed accounts of the trip. has major investments and commands significant influence. 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. grenades were marked 'UP'. This stands for Ulbricht Pakistan, "The planning and execution of the conspiracy has been which is a private weapons company in Pakistan with fully uncovered. As for the master-minds abroad, we will get Austrian collaboration. details from them only when we get the chance to interrogate 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. on March 12, seven gangsters armed with rifles and hand In any case, the investigators are now saddled with a job 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

44 INDIA TODAY » JUNE SI). 199j state. The second is to launch a drive against the underworld the wanted The USis still on the basis of the huge amount of peripheral information that list. Even after such a thorough probe has generated. being let off, they V not convinced US officials have been given a sneak preview of the were asked to re- interrogation reports of the men who went to Pakistan for port regularly to police \t Pakistan's training. They have been told of the involvement of a Pakistani stations, something which k role was on national in obtaining the explosives. They have also been only a court can order. Some shown a list of seizures and told that these arms could not have victims have filed petitions in an official come in without Pakistan's help, just as the saboteurs could the high court against their illegal not have sneaked past the immigration counter at Karachi detention and continued harass- level. airport without official connivance. ment by the police. The Americans admit that the evidence is significant and What's worse, there are charges that they, in turn, have passed on information about various policemen not necessarily connected with the Islamic fundamentalist groups in West Asia who sponsor probe are now involved in a widespread extortion terrorism. But the US authorities are still not convinced racket, with money being extracted from Muslims that the Pakistani government is directly involved and not on threat of arrest and implication in the bomb just its citizens in their individual capacity. The investi- conspiracy. Says a noted advocate, P.A. Sebastian, who is gators still have not been able to establish a connection the secretary of the Committee for the Protection of Demo- between the Pakistani national who made arrangements for cratic Rights: "Last week alone, six Malayali Muslims from the RDX, and the isi. The testimony of those who were Nagpada told me that they had to pay up to Rs 15,000 each to trained in Pakistan has been dismissed because the US avoid being locked up and beaten. The amount can be as high believes that interrogation reports can be cooked up. And as Rs 1 lakh if richer people are targeted.'' Added a prominent the absence of entry stamps on their passports at Karachi social worker, Sushoba Barwe: "If the charges are true, it's has been pooh-poohed because the US claims that Pakistani very worrying, since it'll only alienate the Muslims further." airports are notoriously lax in such matters. After a lull created by the demand for a CBI takeover of the The Government is now looking for irrefutable evidence— blasts probe, the police investigation is back on steam. "It such as the source of funding for the operation—to nail Pakistan. The inter- state and international dimensions of the conspiracy have been cited as a reason for handing over the probe to the CBI. The Bombay Police, however, dis- miss 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 cooper- ation 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 encounter deaths are mostly from One of the accused in the case being taken into police custody Dawood Ibrahim's gang, as police main- tain that gangsters from the other two major underworld looks like we'll continue to be in charge of the case," says groups led by Arun Gawli and Amar Naik now tend to Samra. But with the top-level conspirators safely ensconced surrender rather than open fire. The men arrested in the bomb abroad, the police can only hope to pick up secondary blast conspiracy have also surrendered without a fight. hoodlums and extract more information on the entire crimi- But the city-wide police crackdown has resulted in an nal enterprise. And they seem in no hurry yet to file unintended fallout which has the potential for serious, long- chargesheets against the accused in court. Meanwhile, with term damage. There are allegations that the police detain- communal tension in the city rising after the sensational ed scores of people, including women and children, for vary- murders of two legislators. Chief Minister and ing periods without formally arresting them as required un- Samra have to worry once again about maintaining peace der the law, and assaulted several of them in a bid to extract and thwarting the foreign-inspired conspiracy to spread information about their relatives or friends who are on murder and mayhem in India's financialcapital . •