Who are the kingpins behind the fake currency racket?

To put the huge tranche of fake Indian currency notes (FICNs), printed clandestinely in Pakistan, into circulation, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) still trusts D company the most.

After suffering many losses in 2013-14, owing to the arrest of Abdul Karim Tunda , the D company is back in the reckoning and, thanks to the ISI, is offering huge discount on the exchange rate of FICN to keep up terror funding and scale up terror strikes in India that have seen a downward trend, sources in central agencies said.

The arrest of Tunda, alleged Lakshar-e-Toiba (LeT) bomb expert for India operations, had exposed several links of the D company counterfeit currency business, leading to the busting of several modules in the second half of 2013 and early 2014.

Despite being on the watch list of the US, Interpol, India and many other countries, the Dawood Ibrahim gang still has a network of hawala agents in different countries. These agents, in turn, have a well-developed network of sub-agents, field agents and couriers.

To get the confidence of the operatives back into the risky business, the ISI, too, has worked hard on improving the quality of FICN, even at the risk of exposing itself, by matching with Pakistani currency on several parameters like the paper, poly vinyl alcohol, wax pick quotient etc.

Dawood's trusted lieutenant Iqbal Kana alias Hadiz Iqbal alias Malik Bhai is again on the go. "To hoodwink his nefarious business, Kana runs a cloth business in Lahore in the Punjab Block of Azam Cloth market. He also owns a cosmetic showroom at Shalimar Gate in Lahore," said an official involved in the seizures of counterfeit currency.

To distribute and route the counterfeit Indian currency, Kana uses the services of a Dubai-based Pakistani national, Syed Mohammed Shafi alias Shaikh Shafi, who was earlier posted at the Pakistani high commission in Kathmandu is still using his Nepal links to route FICN into India with the help of his Nepali associate, Bal Krishna Khadka, based in Abu Dhabi, sources said.

Another key operative of D company's FICN wing is Pakistan-based Aslam Chaudhary alias Taimoor.

"Known as customwala in the hawala network, Aslam is very active in infusing counterfeit currency into India and controls the network of FICN agents based in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand and Nepal. His modus operandi is to get the FICN shipments out of Karachi to the UAE, from where they are packed in smaller shipments and sent to staging countries and then routed to India," the source said.

The other effective members of the FICN gang supporting Kana and his key men in Pakistan are Subha Bahi alias Irshad, Hanif Musa, Aslam Shera, Shahid Bilal and Fazlur Rehman. Together, they control nearly 60% of the illicit FICN trade and are responsible for routing the currency to actual terror modules through a maze of networks.

The key networks that ISI uses as cut-outs are Suleman Majumdar and Imran Mulla in Bangladesh, Rana, Ansari and Aftab in Nepal and Mallick and Parera in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

In espionage parlance, a cut-out is a mutually trusted intermediary, method or channel of communication, facilitating the exchange of information between agents. They usually only know the source and destination of the information to be transmitted, but are unaware of the identities of any other persons involved in the espionage process. Thus, a captured cutout cannot be used to identify members of an espionage cell.

Owing to the successful busting of several networks in Nepal and Bangladesh, of late, Thailand has emerged as the most powerful cut-out. The Thailand network is currently being run by about six kingpins, mainly from Bangkok and the Khon Kean province near the Laos border.

"Many of them have very strong clout in Thai immigration and customs that allows them to get and route FICN undetected. Sunil Khadka, a D company operative of Nepal-origin, has opened a restaurant in Soi, Ratchadaphisek, Bangkok, which is being used as a meeting point for organised crime activities, including smuggling of FICN, drug and arms," said sources.