— Photo Courtesy: CBI

Syed Abdul Karim Tunda

NEW DELHI: Top Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Syed Abdul Karim's arrest has again focussed attention on possible links between the Islamist terror groups and the Karachi-based mafia of Dawood Ibrahim Kaksar, the architect of the 1993 serial bombing of Mumbai that claimed 257 lives.

Little is known about just what Karim was doing in Mombassa, but intelligence sources told The Hindu that the terrorist was most likely using well-established organised crime infrastructure in East Africa to hide out. In recent years, there has been growing evidence that the Dawood Ibrahim mafia has made available its resources to Islamist terror groups like the Lashkar and the Harkat ul-Jihad Islami.

India's intelligence community believes that Dawood Ibrahim has deep linkages with affluent traders in Mombassa, often individuals of south Asian descent. Anees Ibrahim, Dawood Ibrahim's younger brother, made substantial investments in local shipping, which were used to facilitate the movement of narcotics into East Africa for onward sale in Europe and the United States.

Haji Mohammad Ismail, a magnate with interests in the cold-storage business and shipping, is among several Dubai-based businessmen who has for long faced media allegations of using Somalia, Dubai and Mombassa-based operations to support Dawood Ibrahim's trafficking operations. In 1997, a Nairobi court charged another Dawood Ibrahim-linked businessman, Madat Ali Chatur, with customs and tax-fraud.

In October 2003, the United States Treasury Department officially determined that the crime syndicate's "smuggling routes from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa are shared with Osama bin-Laden and his terrorist network." The U.S. Treasury Department also said that Dawood Ibrahim had "financially supported Islamic militant groups working against India, such as [the] Lashkar-e-Taiba."

The determination followed a 1998 a terror strike on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi that killed 213 people and injured 5,000. A simultaneous attack on the U.S. embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, killed 11 people and injured 70. Again in 2002, terrorists bombed an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombassa, and fired two surface-to-air missiles at a chartered flight that had taken off from the port city.

Islamist networks' reach in East Africa date back to at least 1994, when Osama bin-Laden's secretary, Wadi el-Hage, is believed to have set up an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya. The cell is thought to have been instrumental in the 1998 attacks. Interestingly, the Lashkar has long been linked to al-Qaeda, and is a member of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders in 1998.

Authorities in Kenya struck hard against al-Qaeda after the attacks. Soon after the 1998 attacks, police arrested several terror suspects, mainly Yemeni, Somali and Pakistani nationals. In July 2001, Nairobi police arrested 8 Yemeni and 13 Somali nationals for suspected terror links. Again, that November, police arrested more than 20 people suspected of having links with al-Qaeda.

But experts believe Islamist terror groups have succeeded in recruiting numbers of local operatives and sympathisers — a fact which led authorities to acknowledge, in 2003, the continued threat terror strikes in the region. In a 2004 paper for the United States Institute of Peace, analyst Gilbert Khadiagala pointed to the existence of "an indigenous terrorist movement in Kenya," linked to Somali and Saudi Arabia-based Islamists.

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