India Gets Dawood

Don comes home

India’s most wanted fugitive captured in sensational coastal raid on Dubai villa

SANDEEP UNNITHAN NEWDELHI MARCH10,2019

India awoke on a Sunday morning to the media event of the decade. Breathless TV an- chors screamed, reporters jostled over wires in the North Block briefing room. The series of photographs that electrified them showed a sullen, unshaved, middle-aged man in silken pyjamas surrounded by hooded men in black.

“We’ve brought Dawood Ibrahim to justice,” a sombre Home Minister Krishan Reddy said to a forest of micro- phones and flashbulbs. “He’ll face trial here,” he said.

Home Secretary Suresh Mathur would only confirm that the 64-year-old fugitive don
 had been physically identified
 by a Bollywood starlet to whom he had been briefly married. His DNA had matched those taken from his brother and sister in Dongri, Mumbai. He was being interrogated at an undisclosed destination.

The man designated as a
global terrorist in 2003 would
soon be handed over to
Maharashtra Police to stand
trial for masterminding the
March 12, 1993 serial blasts
that had killed 257 people. It
was widely speculated that the
don had surrendered. Another
version said he had been de-
ported from one of the Middle Eastern countries.

Details which trickled in through the day, however, pointed to a sensational ‘snatch and grab’ military opera- tion involving RAW’S military wing and the navy.

The chase for Dawood had taken nearly five years and was spurred by the new Opposition-led Government. ‘Operation Mareech’ hit paydirt when the don’s weakness for cigarettes was discovered. The ‘Treasurer’ brand luxury cigarettes costing over $50 a pack were bought from the same shop in Bur Dubai since the early 1980s. Word of this leaked to the Indian intelligence agencies who infiltrated the retailer. In early 2019, they discovered the cigarettes were to be delivered to a private villa on Palm Jumeira. India’s most wanted man was planning to visit a private villa on the man-made island off the coast of the emirate.

A cargo dhow operated by a RAW front company crew- ed by Indian Navy marine commandos and operatives from the Special Group, a covert RAW force based in Sarsawa, had already made its way towards the Persian Gulf.

Five nautical miles off Palm Jumeira, the dozen commandos launched a Zodiac inflatable craft for the island. They knew exactly where the villa with the boat jetty was. They had recreated their target area and practised this mission dozens of times at a desolate beach in Karwar.

The don was lightly guarded. Years of unmolested travel into the Emirates had lulled him into complacency. His bodyguards were neutralised. His first reaction reportedly was one of shock. Then, denial. “I am Anis,” he shouted, the name on the fake Pakistani passport he was car- rying. He was photographed, blindfolded and rushed out into the dhow. The dhow emitted a burst of coded messages to an orbiting naval communications satellite. The boat sped north- wards towards the Strait of Hormuz where it made contact with INS Chakra, an Indian nuclear submarine waiting off the UAE coast.

The dhow was sunk to the seabed after the crew broadcast a fake distress signal. Watched by a high-flying P-8I Poseidon spy plane, the valuable cargo was bundled into the submarine which had made a risky trip around the peninsula into the shallow waters of the Gulf. They could not risk the lumbering dhow spending time on the surface. The vessel then dived and made a swift submerged passage to Mumbai.
The incident has already kicked off a diplomatic furore.

The Gulf nations termed it an invasion and planned eco- nomic and diplomatic retaliation. Pakistan was strangely silent. The Opposition hailed the armed forces and intelligence agencies for capturing the fugitive, but castigated the ruling party for making electoral capital out of his arrest. The don had been arrested just weeks before the country went in to elect the 17th Lok Sabha.

Follow the writer on Twitter @SandeepUnnithan