""Ayeessa Kya? (Is it so?)" continues...

Under political pressure, the Rauf Waliullah Murder Case was transferred from the Gujarat Police to the CBI and was being handled by a Branch I was not associated with.

Latif, a dreaded household name in Gujarat, had, meanwhile, moved with Dawood to Karachi and was an honoured guest of Taufiq Jalianwalla, a Karachi-based gold and silver smuggler. Taufiq was a partner of Dawood and Tiger Memon in their smuggling business and they together had planned and executed the Bombay Bomb Blasts on March 12, 1993 ( Please see ‘ Memons: A pyrrhic victory ’ on
page XYZ). Latif, too, had played an important role in the conspiracy. He had received a consignment of arms and explosives that landed at Dighi Port in Maharashtra on January 9, 1993. He had distributed the arms, ammunition and hand grenades to other conspirators. The arms and ammunition that reached Sanjay Dutt, the famous film star doing time at Yerwada Jail now, were part of this consignment. When news of the Bombay blasts came in the afternoon of March 12, 1993, Latif was present with Dawood and Taufiq at his (Taufiq’s) Doraji colony residence in Karachi and exchanged congratulatory messages with the two masterminds of the terror attack. He continued to stay in Pakistan and all law-enforcement and intelligence agencies of the country believed that Abdul Latif, the Dawood of Gujarat, was in hiding in Karachi, until one day the Anti Terrorism Squad of the Gujarat Police got a specific bit
of information on him.
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On 22nd September, 1995 K.N. Sharma, the Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG), Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Gujarat informed me on phone that Abdul Latif was calling on Ahmedabad telephone numbers 66346xx & 66337xx to extort over Rupees 5 crores from the subscriber of the two phones. Unable to pay the amount, the subscriber had got in touch with the ATS.

Those were the days when mobile phones had not arrived in India. Even otherwise, a call made on a landline phone from another landline, and that too from another city, was difficult to track.

To be continued...