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"It's all yours, Al. Me I'm quittin'..."
—Johnny Torrio, gangster.
 In
the empire of the evil, only the very ruthless inherit the crown. Only
when the villainous Torrio handed over his kingdom to Al Capone could
the Chicago mobster expand his empire of crime in the 1920s. When Joseph
Valachi turned over the New York mafia business to Lucky Luciano in the
1950s, it led to an escalation in crime that took decades to crush.
Today it is the equally violent and murky Indian underworld that is witness
to a passing of batons. Dawood Ibrahim, hiding from the law and his rivals,
is slowly ceding power to a Varanasi-born comrade-in-crime who has already
impacted Indian public life. Aftab Ahmed Ansari is ready to be the sultan
of the Indian underworld.
Not only is Ansari India's Most Wanted (an Interpol red alert was issued
against his name on December 20), he is also the Indian the Americans
want the most. The heat has been turned on the 31-year-old following the
attack on the American Center in Kolkata. Two years after jumping bail
and fleeing India, Ansari now has his headquarters in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
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| WRONG ARM OF LAW: Ramraj Ram, retired police
sub-inspector, was arrested at Bhojpur village, Bihar. He helped Ansari
get a passport in Farhan Mallick's name |
Following several meetings with Indian investigating agencies last week
agents from the FBI are convinced that it was Ansari who had engineered
the January 22 attack, which left five policemen dead. The killing of
two Pakistani nationals believed to be part of the group of attackers
in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, last week provided more clues. Preliminary forensic
examinations indicate that empties found at the USIS were fired from an
AK-47 rifle recovered from the two Pakistanis in Hazaribagh. The police
claim that Mohammad Zahid, one of the two killed, confirmed in a dying
confession that he was also the motorcycle-borne assailant who fired at
the policemen outside the American Center and he came from Multan in Pakistan.
Zahid's links to Ansari seemed to be established after the Bengal police's
Criminal Investigation Department (cid) stated that the same slain criminal
was also part of the team that had abducted Kolkata shoe baron Partho
Roy Burman last year in an operation masterminded by Ansari. Hours after
the Kolkata attack, Ansari had called up an officer in the Kolkata cid
and claimed that it had been carried out by the Asif Reza Commando Force,
named after his pointman in the Burman kidnapping.
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| ALARM BELL: Following the daring attack, paramilitary
forces and commandos have been deployed in large numbers outside American
Center |
The Interpol alert (A-1476/12-2001) on Ansari mentions that the 5ft 6
inch tall Indian, a holder of law and journalism degrees, and fluent in
Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and English, was likely to be in Pakistan. He faces
eight cases in India (see box), and one of his aliases is Farhan Mallick,
the name under which he acquired a second passport.
Ansari, say investigators, is a man with a razor-sharp mind, a lust
for money and the ambition to be India's most-dreaded don. "I want
to be bigger than Dawood," he had once boasted.
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| SLAIN ATTACKERS: A joint police team from Jharkhand
and Delhi stormed a hideout in Hazaribagh and killed two Pakistanis
who were part of the attack team |
In his desire to be bigger than Dawood, Ansari has forged ties with jehadi
outfits like the Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed. He is more
a criminal than a terrorist and his sole motive is to acquire hard cash.
Ansari uses his Indian network to provide logistical support to terrorists,
like safe hideouts. He also familiarises them with their potential targets,
from cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, to landmarks
like the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. In exchange, the terrorists help
him carry out attacks on targets like Burman, and Ansari shares a part
of the booty with them. Police estimate that in 2001, the Ansari gang
made Rs 53 crore from extortion and ransom, of which a big percentage
was passed on to jehadis, including Mohammad Atta, head of the wtc attackers.
Investigators say Ansari now lives in a cream-tiled house near a military
training school on the Grand Trunk Road in Rawalpindi. His neighbours
know him as Zahid Sheikh, and he carries a Pakistani passport issued in
the name of Safeer Mohammad Rana.
Ansari's every move is being tracked, and his e-mail accounts-(like syndicateinmost@yahoo.com,Vikash4India@yahoo.com,b4baba004@yahoo.
com-are
under siege by investigators. In one email, Ansari warns an associates
in India, "Aajkal mama log server par baith kar mail check kar rahe
hain ... bahut robot ghoom rahen hain ... Delhi 26 (January) ke baad hi
jaana, halaat thik nahin hai ..." (Policemen are tracking servers
for e-mails, patrolling everywhere, it is better to go to Delhi after
January26).
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| FERRYING TERROR:
The Maruti helped attackers to make a quick getaway from Kolkata;
armed assailants rode the motorcycle and shot policemen |
The Kolkata strike has helped Ansari achieve recognition as the helmsman
of the Indian underworld. It could not have been better timed, coinciding
with the visit of FBI director Robert S. Muller to India. The involvement
of an American target would certainly have pleased his jehadi friends.
So with one stone, Ansari killed several birds.
He now plans to exploit this reputation in order to extort protection
and ransom money from the wealthy. His cadre knows that if any one of
them is killed, Ansari will seek revenge-the Asif Reza Khan Commando Force
was raised for exactly such a purpose.
Yet, the elimination of Khan and the two Pakistanis at Hazaribagh, and
the several arrests in connection with the Burman case, have dealt huge
blows to Ansari. As Neeraj Kumar, joint director CBI and leading investigator
of the Ansari story, says, "Every time he has threatened to run amuck
the security agencies have been able to deal crippling blows to his network."
The heat has been turned on the new don. The enemy is now hunting in pairs.
As is the enemy's enemy.
-with Sumit Mitra and Sanjay Kumar Jha
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CURRENT
ISSUE FEB 11, 2002
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