NEW DELHI: Dawood Ibrahim, India's most wanted criminal, is working closely with the Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups like the Lashker-e-Taiba, says a prominent US magazine in a report on the synchronisation of organised crime and terrorism.
Dawood, now based in Karachi, runs a mafia stretching into 14 countries and is now the target of two US investigations, the Washington based US News and World Report says in its latest issue on how the world's biggest scourges of organised crime and terrorism were coming together.
The exclusive cover story, The New Business of Terror, reveals how terrorist groups, pressured by a worldwide crackdown on funding, are transforming their cells into crime syndicates - and how counter-terrorism officials are unprepared for the shift in tactics.
The investigative report, based on interviews with police and intelligence agents in six countries, is by the magazine's chief investigative correspondent, David E. Kaplan.
The report says, "The boss of India's top syndicate controls a criminal network that reaches into 14 countries, with a small army of contract killers, smugglers, and extortionists at his command."
"But there is another side to Dawood Ibrahim. The Muslim exile from Bombay has thrown in his lot with Al Qaeda and other jihadists, according to the US and Indian governments, and has become one of the world's most wanted terrorists."
Apart from chronicling his rise, the magazine quotes US officials as saying they now have Dawood at the centre of two investigations: one by the Drug Enforcement Administration looking at his ties to the heroin trade; another, by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), tracing his assets and ties to terrorist groups through a top Pakistani CD counterfeiter.
On his role in the 1993 Mumbai's terror blasts, which killed 257 people, the report adds the shift from gangster to terrorist came after rioting targeted Bombay's Muslims.
Bent on revenge, Dawood engineered the smuggling into India of tonnes of explosives provided by Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence. The bombings that followed made Dawood India's most wanted man.
According to the report, the ISI then made Dawood an offer: If he relocated to Pakistan's port city of Karachi and kept working with the ISI, it would guarantee him control of the nation's coastal smuggling routes.
For 12 years now, Dawood has called Pakistan home, where he is believed to own shopping malls, luxury homes, and shipping and trucking lines that smuggle arms into India and heroin into Europe.
India's FBI, the Central Bureau of Investigation, puts D Company's (as his network is sometimes known) annual income in the hundreds of millions of dollars and says it has up to 5,000 members.
According to fresh revelations, Kaplan writes: "In Pakistan, Dawood has ties to several terrorist groups, say US officials, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed by India for October's bombings in New Delhi, which killed at least 60, and a bloody 2001 attack on India's parliament."
He has allegedly met with Al Qaeda leaders and even made a deal to share his smuggling routes with Al Qaeda operatives.
But with Washington pressing for his capture, Dawood, now 50, may have outlived his usefulness to the ISI, the report concludes.
Indian police are wiretapping his men and tracing his operations overseas. With an Interpol notice out for his arrest, his movements are constrained.
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