The firing on Iqbal Kaskar, younger brother of fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim, was not the handiwork of any rival gang.
In fact it was outsourced by the Intelligence Bureau to ferret out Dawood from his hideout in Saudi Arabia or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) in Pakistan.
Since Indian intelligence investigators have failed in their attempts so far to identify Dawood’s actual hideout, as he keeps shuttling between Saudi Arabia and Fata, the IB decided to send a panic signal to the second-most wanted terrorist by killing his brother’s bodyguard.
This was in anticipation of the fact that the minute the fugitive gangster would hear of the attack, he would try to call Kaskar or his henchmen to get more details.
According to a state home department source, the firing on Kaskar was the fallout of the Abottabad operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy seals. “Central agencies planned the whole operation, hoping that it would trigger a flurry of calls from Dawood or Chhota Shakeel and would thereby help them track his actual whereabouts,” said the source.
Disclosing how the whole operation was staged, the official from the home department said that IB got in touch with a local IB informer from Nagpada. “The contract of arranging for shooters was given to this informer, who further got in touch with one of the small-time goons based out of Mumbai,” said the official, adding that this local goon was not told who the target was.
He was only instructed to provide two shooters, as the motive was never really to kill Kaskar. In fact, Kaskar was not even present at the location of the shootout. He was in the first floor of the building that his bodyguard Sayyed Abu Bakr alias Asif Johri was guarding.
Further, confirming the fact that the firing was not a consequence of a gang war, state home minister R.R. Patil, earlier in the day told reporters in the Ahmednagar district, “There are no gangs (left) in Mumbai, so there is no question of a gang war. The investigation till now indicates that Kaskar’s bodyguard was the target.”
However, what is surprising is that if the bodyguard was the target, then why would the assailants come all the way to Dawood’s den in Pakmodia street? “They could have bumped him off near his house in Jogeshwari,” the official said.