Mumbai, Feb. 3: Mumbai police today arrested Dawood Ibrahim's younger brother Iqbal Kaskar on charges of assault and attempted extortion, upping the ante against the "global terrorist's" family members for the first time in many years.
The action by the cops - long accused of looking the other way while the fugitive don ran his businesses in Mumbai via proxy - came four days after a real estate agent filed an FIR against the 49-year-old Iqbal.
Till the arrest, JJ Marg police station, where the case was lodged, showed Iqbal as "wanted".
The police station is 500m from Dawood's old family home on the bustling, dingy Pakmodia street in Mumbai's Pydhonie area. The apartment, which can be reached via an easy-to-miss dark and narrow flight of stairs, had become Iqbal's den.
A fortnight back, another key Dawood aide, Tariq Parveen, was arrested from Pydhonie's Sarang Street in a midnight swoop following a joint operation by the anti-terror squads of Mumbai and Uttar Pradesh police.
Tariq is one of Iqbal's old cronies and the two had been deported from the UAE to India in 2004.
Extortion and assault are not something the portly Iqbal has been accused of for the first time. But senior Mumbai cops claimed things had changed over the past few months.
"After the September summit between Narendra Modi and Barack Obama in Washington, it was agreed that India and the US would jointly seek to 'disrupt all financial and tactical support' to D-company along with a host of other terror outfits and entities," a senior police officer said.
"Some decisions were taken by the Indian government in consultation with the American government during President Obama's January visit in New Delhi. There is a plan and a strategy to smoke out Dawood - the arrests of Iqbal and Tariq should be seen in that context."
Iqbal was arrested along with two aides for assaulting the real estate agent and attempting to extort Rs 3 lakh from him. Salim Abdul Jabbar Shaikh, a resident of Byculla, had allegedly been summoned by Iqbal and his aides to an apartment on January 30 and assaulted and threatened with dire consequences when he refused to pay up.
After Dawood fled India following the 1993 Mumbai blasts that he is accused of engineering, his sister Haseena Parkar ran the D-company's core business of extortion from the heart of Mumbai.
Haseena, who died last year of a cardiac arrest, often travelled to and from the UAE, cocking a snook at the police who claimed to be keeping a tight watch on her.
She too had an extortion case against her. The probe in the case, lodged in 2005, continued for years till Haseena died. It was finally closed.
Iqbal had been brought to India from the UAE for trial in a murder case and a conspiracy case. He spent four years in jail as an undertrial and was later acquitted in both.
His return had been seen by Mumbai's anti-terror squad as an attempt by Dawood to strengthen his aging sister. "Apart from the extortion racket that he and Haseena ran, Iqbal was Dawood's point man for every sinister and overground business of the D-company run from Mumbai," the police officer said.
The officer said Iqbal was also in charge of investing Dawood's terror-earned money through benaami transactions in real estate and the stock market.
"They work through labyrinthine channels and hawala routes that make it difficult to track the money trail. And since that requires investigations and co-operation from other countries, it completely depends on the political will of the government of the day to pursue the matter."
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