Pakistan hiding India's most wanted criminal, ex-home minister says

May 8, 2011, 12:48 GMT

New Delhi - Pakistan had been misleading India on the whereabouts of its most wanted criminal, Dawood Ibrahim, just like it fed the US 'white lies' about Osama bin Laden, opposition politician Lal Krishna Advani wrote in his blog Sunday.

Ibrahim, 56, is charged with masterminding the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in which 257 people died and 700 were wounded.

India has repeatedly asked Pakistan to extradite Ibrahim who, according to Indian investigators, lives in the port city of Karachi. Pakistan has consistently denied this.

Bin Laden was shot dead in a raid by elite US commandos Monday in a fortified compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, about 60 kilometres north of capital Islamabad.

The strike on bin Laden's safe house seems to have rattled Ibrahim, who has allegedly moved out of his palatial bungalow in Karachi, the Times of India newspaper reported citing Indian intelligence sources.

Ibrahim has also shifted the venue of his son Moin's wedding, scheduled for May 28, to Dubai, the report said.

In November, German magazine der Speigel reported that Ibrahim was connected to an alleged plot to attack the German parliament.

In 2001, as India's home minister, Advani had told then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf that handing over Ibrahim to India would generate enormous trust among Indians in him and Pakistan, he wrote on his blog.

Musharraf said then that Ibrahim was not in Pakistan.

'It was the same kind of white lie that Pakistanis have been feeding to Americans all these years about Osama,' Advani, a member of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, wrote.

Ibrahim figured third in a 2010 Forbes list of the world's most wanted fugitives, behind bin Laden and Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin Guzman.

According to the US Treasury Department, Ibrahim's crime and drugs syndicate is involved in large-scale shipments of narcotics to Western Europe and shares smuggling routes from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa with al-Qaeda, with which it also has financial ties.

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