MUMBAI, 8 August 2007 — Indian intelligence officials have dismissed media reports that underworld don Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, his trusted lieutenant Chotta Shakeel and alleged mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai blasts Tiger Memon have been taken into protective custody by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
A report in the Times of India said the three were rounded up last week from their hide-out near the Pakistan-Afghan border and taken to a safe house on the outskirts of Quetta, the provincial capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
All three were likely to be moved out of Quetta soon, said the report, adding that ISI’s move was “a desperate attempt” by Pakistan’s intelligence “to save face of the Musharraf regime amid mounting US pressure to arrest these criminals.”
“We have no information about his detention or if he has been injured as a section of the media is saying. If he had been confined, we would have got wind of it. It is too big a development to miss,” a top intelligence official was quoted by Indo-Asian News Service.
Several residents of Pakmodia Street and in Temkar Mohalla, where Dawood and his aides resided and have relatives and friends, whom Arab News met also dismissed the reports. A close relative of Dawood said “No one knows where Dawood Bhai or the others are located. All these reports are pure imagination.”
