New Delhi, Dec. 2 :     Gopal Tamrakar, the Nepali national identified by investigators as one of the six hijackers, is a smuggler and was an associate of slain Nepali minister Mirza Dilshad Beg who was known to have had links with the ISI. Tamrakar may have procured the boarding passes for the five other hijackers who have been identified as S.A. Qazi, Sayyed Mushtaq, Ahmed Sheikh and Ibrahim Mistri from Pakistan, and one Afghan. Barring the Afghan national, whose identity is not yet known, names of the others appear in the passenger manifest of IC 814. Serially, Sheikh is third on the list, Mistri is 85th, Tamrakar is 147th and Qazi is 163rd. A source in an Indian security agency said Tamrakar?s elder brother owns several foreign goods shops at Kathmandu?s Tribhuvan International airport. Investigators believe Tamrakar made the arrangements to smuggle in the five hijackers from the arrival enclosure of the airport to the departure lounge after the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight PK-804 landed on Friday morning. The source believes that this would have ensured that the foreign nationals did not get their passports stamped at the immigration counter. With fake identity documents, they could have passed off as Indian nationals who do not require passports in Nepal. Since Tamrakar?s brother has been running shops at the airport for several years, he had contacts among Nepali officials ?vulnerable? to inducements. These contacts were utilised to bypass security norms that should have been followed by airport authorities while checking in transit passengers. Tamrakar, investigators believe, may have procured the tickets for the hijackers individually and then produced them together at the Indian Airlines counter to get the six boarding passes. The security agencies are now checking if any heavy baggage had been booked against the names of the six. The Tamrakar brothers were close confidants of Mirza Dilshad Beg, the powerful Nepal minister who was shot dead by the Chhota Rajan gang in 1997 after the ganster fell out with Dawood Ibrahim. Beg, who was known to be close to Dawood and had even acted as his pointsman in Nepal, used to push in arms, ammunition and narcotics through the porous Indo-Nepal border into Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and western India. According to security officials, Pakistan?s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) used Beg?s underworld network to smuggle its agents and saboteurs into India. Senior Indian officials said Tamrakar?s criminal background and his links with Beg have prompted them to explore whether the Indian Airlines aircraft was hijacked by Dawood?s men with the complicity of Pakistani intelligence. Even Mistri, whose name is more Indian than Pakistani, could be a member of Dawood?s gang. Now suspected to be in Karachi, the underworld don enjoys tremendous clout among Pakistani officialdom.