4 plotters of 1993 Mumbai blasts held in Gujarat 29 years on – Times of India

MUMBAI: Four conspirators of the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai who had been evading law-keepers for 29 years have been arrested near Ahmedabad airport by the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad (ATS).
Abu Bakar, Sayyed Qureshi, Mohd Shoeb Qureshi and Mohd Yusuf Ismail Shaikh alias Yusuf Bhatka, all residents of Mumbai, were arrested on May 12 following a tip-off. “They have been remanded to seven days in police custody,” said additional DGP (ATS) Amit Vishwakarma.

Sources in the ATS said the four had arrived in Ahmedabad four to five days before they were arrested. It was not clear why they were in Gujarat, but an ATS officer ventured that they had come to renew their passports.
The ATS has booked them for using forged documents to obtain passports to flee the country in 1995. For the 1993 blasts, a special Terrorist and Destructive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) court had declared them “proclaimed offenders”, said ATS DIG Deepan Bhadran.
Vishwakarma said they will be handed over to the CBI, which is investigating the serial blasts in which 257 people were killed. “Interpol had issued a red-corner notice against them. So they had used forged documents to hide their identities,” he added.
In Mumbai, the century-old chawl in Musafirkhana near Manish Market that three of them called home is undergoing heavy repair. Most people around were unaware of these former residents, but a middle-aged man recalled them. “Sayyed Qureshi’s sister stays here. The families of the other two left many years ago,” he said. Qureshi’s sister, Fatema, in her 60s, refused to talk, saying Qureshi was not in touch with her. For a living, Fatema, who is unmarried, cooks and supplies meals.
Before escaping to the Middle East, Bhadran said, all four used to work for gold smuggler Mohammed Dossa, a henchman of gangster Dawood Ibrahim, in the 1990s. They were part of the conspiracy hatched by Dawood and his aides to carry out blasts in Mumbai, the DIG added.
“They told us they were awestruck when they met Dawood… They said ‘Dawood Bhai’ had instructed them to do something big and they were ready to follow his orders. Now the four are quite repentant about getting mesmerised by Dawood and wasting nearly three decades of their life being on the run,” said a senior ATS official.
Following the serial blasts, they obtained passports using forged documents and fled to the Middle East, said Bhadran. One of the accused — Shoeb — had come to India in 2002 to get married in Bengaluru and left later for Oman with his wife.
(With inputs by Mateen Hafeez)