Dawood Ibrahim

New Delhi, Aug. 12: The CBI today approached Saudi Arabia for confirmation of reports that Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Anees — wanted in the 1993 Bombay blasts — had been detained at Jeddah airport.

“We have requested them to revert at the earliest since we will have to start the deportation process,” a senior CBI official said.

Till late this evening, home minister Shivraj Patil had not received official word on the reports coming out of Riyadh that Anees had been caught with a fake passport.

The Telegraph had reported on April 28, 2008, about members of Dawood’s family getting hold of Indian passports, 500 of which had gone missing from the Dubai consulate.

Mumbai joint commission Rakesh Maria said: “We have received information from our informants’ network that three persons have been detained at Jeddah airport. We are trying to verify the identity of these people.”

Sources in Mumbai police later said the three men were detained with fake Pakistani passports — Sayyed Omar Haji Ebrahim (suspected to be Anees), Sikander Khan Iqbal Khan (suspected to be Dawood gang member Salim Chiplun) and Shafi Bawa Ahmed Bawa (suspected to be another gangster Shamsher Dawood).

Intelligence agencies sources said there was a red-corner notice against Anees, issued by Interpol at the CBI’s request. The notice contains his description, a list of cases against him in India — the Bombay blasts prime accused is wanted for the murder of music mogul Gulshan Kumar and for almost 70 other cases of murder, attempt to murder, extortion and kidnapping — and a pending request for deportation/extradition. He is also wanted in a match-fixing scandal and for smuggling counterfeit notes.

The Indian embassy in Riyadh was clueless. “We cannot say if it is true or not. Saudi authorities take a long time with paperwork, and will probably inform us only after they have completed all formalities,” a source said.

But a senior intelligence official said the possibility of Anees being detained was high since he made regular trips to Saudi Arabia for Umrah (a pilgrimage to Mecca). “Even Dawood goes there for Umrah regularly,” he added.

There were fears that even if Anees had been caught, he might escape being deported to India as he had done in 2002. He had been detained in Dubai on the basis of the red-corner notice but was sent to Pakistan instead of being handed over to India. The CBI team that went with an extradition request was turned back on the technical ground that it was not carrying Anees’s fingerprints.

Anees had been detained once earlier in Dubai, in 1998, but was let off for want of evidence. In 1996, he had been arrested in Bahrain and sent to Dubai, where he was released.

Anees had been arrested in India too, but that was on murder and extortion charges in the 1980s, long before the serial blasts. The family still lived in India — they fled at the time of the blasts — and he and brother Noora were key players in Dawood’s underworld operations that have now spread to Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.

Joint commissioner Maria said Anees was named in the murder of Samad Khan, nephew of Karim Lala who controlled the underworld till the mid-1980s. The two gangs fought a bloody battle, but Khan’s killing in 1984 broke the back of the Pathan gang and established Dawood as the don.