Former Delhi top cop denies claim Dawood negotiated surrender

www.mangaloretoday.com

Mumbai, May 2, 2015: Former Delhi Police Commissioner Neeraj Kumar today denied reports attributed to him that fugitive terrorist Dawood Ibrahim had negotiated surrender with him months after the 1993 Mumbai blasts and that the government of the day scuttled the plans at the last moment.

Kumar, in an interview to a national daily published today, was quoted as saying Dawood, labelled by the US as Specially Designated Global Terrorist, had got in touch with him and wanted to surrender but the plan was shelved by the government.

Kumar, a 1976 batch IPS officer who retired as Delhi police chief in 2013, said he had not given the interview.

"It was an informal chat with the correspondent who is known to me for sometime. He has given the chat a slant which is both incorrect and unfortunate.

"At no stage was D (Dawood) willing to surrender nor did anyone stop him from surrendering," he said today.

Kumar, who probed the 1993 Mumbai serial blast cases when he was a DIG with CBI, said, "He (Dawood) did speak with me but that was to give his defence in connection with Mumbai serial blast cases."

However, the denial flies in the face of his own comments at a book release function last month where he had made similar claims while referring to Dawood as a "certain gentleman" whom CBI had planned to "get at" with the help of "non-state actors" but the move was scuttled by his "political bosses".

On April 17, Kumar had backed Union Minister V K Singh when he said the Indian Army was capable of executing daring operations to avenge 26/11-like attacks by eliminating offshore criminals but certain "considerations" prevented it from doing so.

The duo was speaking at the launch of journalist-author S Hussain Zaidi’s book "Mumbai Avengers", a fictional account of a covert operation by a retired Indian Army officer to avenge the 26/11 attacks.

"When I was in the CBI for nine years at one time we had conceived a plan to get at a certain gentleman in Pakistan. Everything was done. At the last day we thought we would inform the political bosses or shall I say the boss but he said no, we are not Pakistan, we are India," he had said.

Kumar went on to say that the agency had also planned using "non-state" actors for the mission. "All preparations went down the drain. Lot of money was invested. We had also planned the use of non-state actors as Pakistan has been doing continuously," he had said.

It was Manish Lala, the underworld don’s trusted aide whom he relied on for legal matters, who arranged Kumar’s phone conversations with Dawood.

“Lala told me that Dawood wanted to surrender to prove his innocence,” Kumar, who was with the CBI from 1993 to 2002, said.

Four years later, Lala was gunned down in the streets of Mumbai allegedly by the rival Chhota Rajan gang.