Gangster With Terror Links Is Jailed in India

An Indian underworld boss suspected of transferring money to Al Qaeda terrorists was behind bars here Saturday night after he was arrested in Dubai, while traveling on a Pakistani passport, and deported.

Aftab Ansari was arrested at Dubai airport, in the Persian Gulf, when he was trying to catch a flight to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital. He was carrying a Pakistani passport in the name of one of his several aliases, Indian police said.

Indian intelligence and police sources said in interviews last week that intercepted e-mails suggested that Ansari was a key middleman in the transfer of $100,000 last August to suspected members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Ansari, a journalism and law graduate, forged an alliance with Islamic terrorists in the late 1990s while he was a prisoner in New Delhi’s Tihar jail, the Indian investigators claim. That’s where he befriended Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, now the chief suspect in the Jan. 23 kidnapping in Pakistan of American journalist Daniel Pearl, Indian police and intelligence officers charge.

Indian police also accuse Ansari of masterminding a Jan. 22 drive-by shooting in Calcutta in which five Indian police guards were killed. They say he even called a senior police commander from Dubai to gloat about the attack.

Dubai’s decision to send Ansari back to India on Saturday renews pressure on Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to hand over 20 alleged gangsters and terrorists for trial in India. New Delhi insists that the suspects must be delivered before several hundred thousand Indian troops can be pulled back from the Pakistani border.

“This kind of international cooperation is the only answer to the growing menace of terrorism,” said P. C. Sharma, director of the Central Bureau of Investigation, India’s equivalent of the FBI.

The capture of Ansari also raises the threat of revenge attacks or kidnappings by gang members, or perhaps their more dangerous terrorist allies, who have used hijackings and abductions to press for the release of their leaders.

Indian police refused to say publicly when Ansari was arrested in Dubai, but an Indian government source said he had been held for four days before being transferred Saturday to New Delhi.

Dubai, ‘Sin City’ of the Arab World

The Central Bureau of Investigation has been working more closely with the FBI since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But Sharma refused to say what role, if any, the FBI played in Ansari’s capture.

“Whenever it was necessary to interact with the FBI, we did it,” said Sharma, who met with FBI Director Robert Mueller during the latter’s visit here last month.

Ansari glared defiantly as Indian police paraded him in handcuffs and chains before a bank of cameras. He was wearing a stylish, cream-colored suit and an open-necked shirt--the sort of attire favored by the high rollers and underworld figures who frequent Dubai, the “sin city” of the Arab world.

He was taken to Central Bureau of Investigation headquarters for interrogation, which began Saturday night. Ansari, an Indian citizen, was carrying a passport in the name of Safeer Muhammad Rana, said Neeraj Kumar, Sharma’s second in command.

Pakistani authorities issued the passport Feb. 12, 2001, in the Pakistani city of Lahore, Kumar said. It is valid until 2006, he added, holding up a photocopy of the document.

The Central Bureau of Investigation said Ansari has a large house in Rawalpindi, a suburb of Pakistan’s capital, and Sharma held up a floor plan of the building for reporters.

“We will certainly try to find out his role in all the crimes that are on record in India committed by him,” Sharma told a news conference. “We should also focus on finding out his linkages both in India and outside.”

Calling Ansari “a really good catch,” Sharma mentioned last month’s attack on the American Center in Calcutta, weapons smuggling and kidnapping as examples of what a police statement called “anti-national, terrorist and heinous crimes” dating back to 1992.

But in interviews last week, senior Indian police and intelligence sources named Ansari as a central figure in a kidnapping operation that investigators believe was a source of funds for Al Qaeda.

On Aug. 8, Ansari sent an e-mail to his top lieutenant in India, Asif Reza Khan, asking “whether he agrees to part with $100,000 for a ‘noble cause’ as requested by [Sheikh],” a senior police investigator in Calcutta said.

Khan agreed the next day in an e-mail, and Aug. 11, Ansari replied that “the amount mentioned has been sent to [Sheikh],” the investigator added.

Eight days later, Sheikh wrote Ansari an e-mail saying, “The money that was sent has been passed on,” the police official said. Investigators are now trying to determine whether any of the money was used to support the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

The same sources, who discussed details of the continuing investigation on condition they not be named, said the money isn’t easily traced. It was moved, they say, through the hawala system, an informal network that allows people to transfer large sums of money around the world without records.

Money deposited with a hawala trader in one country is paid out by an associate in another when the recipient shows up with the matching half of a torn bank note, for instance.

Sheikh, who has also been based in Dubai and Pakistan, is a British citizen who admitted in a prison diary that he received training in Afghanistan in 1994 from a Pakistan-based group fighting Indian rule in the disputed state of Kashmir.

Sheikh Jailed in 1994 Kidnappings

Sheikh was jailed for the October 1994 kidnapping of Californian tourist Bela Josef Nuss and three British backpackers. He and his accomplices had demanded the release of jailed terrorist Maulana Masood Azhar, but Sheikh ended up in prison himself.

Sheikh and Azhar were freed in December 1999 in return for the release of passengers on an Indian Airlines flight that had been hijacked to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The men later ended up in Pakistan, and Indian investigators claim that they were assisted by Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, known as Inter-Services Intelligence.

The Central Bureau of Investigation says it intercepted a truck full of military weapons, explosives and ammunition destined for Ansari as the vehicle was traveling in Gujarat state, near the border with Pakistan, on the night of Oct. 26.

The arms haul included two AK-56 assault rifles, pistols and more than 30 pounds of RDX plastic explosive. Police arrested four suspects, and the investigation established that Ansari had sent the weapons from Pakistan, according to a statement issued Saturday night.

The ordnance was for “anti-national and jihadi activities,” the statement added, using the local term for Muslim extremists whose guerrilla war against Indian rule in Kashmir has included frequent terrorist attacks on civilians in that state and elsewhere in India.

The evidence was used to seek Ansari’s return from Dubai, the statement added.

Ansari’s arrest turns a spotlight on what Indian police say is a much bigger fish, Dawood Ibrahim, a Bombay gangster whom a senior Indian intelligence called “a mentor” of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency.

Underworld crime and terrorist connections have made Dawood so powerful, and wealthy, that he is a force unto himself capable of revealing many dark secrets if he was ever interrogated, according to the Indian intelligence officer.

The gangster even lent about $1 million to Pakistan’s national bank when the country was just days away from bankruptcy, the source claimed.

Dawood is another of the 20 suspects New Delhi wants Pakistan to send back to India for trial. He is accused of masterminding a string of terrorist bomb attacks on March 12, 1993, that killed 257 people in Bombay.

An alleged accomplice, Tiger Memon, is also on India’s wanted list.

Musharraf has already said he will never turn any Pakistani citizens over to India, but New Delhi insists that 14 of the men are Indians, including Dawood and Memon.