"My Conversations With Dawood Ibrahim" continues...

One of the four assassins was identified by the
Police as Shailesh Haldankar, a member of Arun Gawli’s gang. A month after the murder of
Ismail Parkar, Shailesh shot dead a Nagpada businessman but was caught by the local residents
who beat him up mercilessly before the Police arrived and arrested him. On account of his injuries, he was admitted to JJ hospital in Nagpada, Bombay for treatment. He lay on a bed in Ward 18 of the hospital, guarded by armed policemen. On September 12, 1992 Dawood sent a team of twenty-four shooters, which stormed into the hospital and fired nearly 500 rounds. It was the first time that AK-47 was used in Bombay’s history of crime. The volley of fire killed
Shailesh Haldankar and two policemen on duty at the spot. Several others, including patients, their attendants and policemen, were grievously injured. Subhash Thakur and Shyam Kishore Garikapatti, two of the main perpetrators of the JJ Hospital Shootout Case, were evading arrest by the Bombay Police since the incident, were now in our custody.. They too during their
interrogation revealed Manish Lala’s proximity with D and Manish’s properties in Bombay.

After the raids on his properties by joint teams of the CBI and Bombay Police, Manish Lala, then
in Dubai, realized he was on police and CBI radars. He was always confident of dealing with the legal system of India and taking it head-on. He surrendered before a Mumbai Court on January 7, 1994, which remanded him to judicial custody and he was lodged in Arthur Road Jail of
Bombay.

In March 1993, barely six months after the J J hospital shootout, a series of bomb blasts rocked the city of Mumbai (For more, please see ‘Return of Memons’). The Bombay Police Crime Branch cracked the case, investigated it and filed their charge-sheet in December 1993. A Designated Court was constituted under the provisions of TADA to try the case.

To be continued...