MUMBAI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday arrested Iqbal Kaskar in a money-laundering case alleging that he was helping his fugitive underworld don brother, Dawood Ibrahim, for extortion and was receiving money from him regularly.
The ED took Kaskar from Thane jail, where he has been lodged since 2017 in an extortion case, and produced him before a special court seeking his custody for interrogation. The court remanded Kaskar into ED custody for seven days.
In Kaskar’s remand application that the ED submitted to the court, it said, “The ED has evidence in its possession that Iqbal Kaskar was regularly receiving substantial proceeds of crime from Dawood.”
The ED claimed that after his deportation to India in 2003, Kaskar had started extorting money from builders and celebrities. It is alleged that Kaskar was using his henchmen to threaten his victims and “collected money on behalf of Dawood”.
The ED lodged Kaskar in a lock-up in their Ballard Estate zonal office, where he will be questioned about his business activities. A police team has been deployed outside the building for security.
In its money-laundering case against Dawood and his close associates and their relatives, the ED has alleged that the fugitive gangster manages his illegal businesses with the help of his close associates in India and personally coordinates with them. The ED is probing around five such persons who are allegedly helping Dawood in generating illegal money and laundering it through their hawala channels. Sources said that key sources of Dawood gang income are illegal betting and real estate investments which they send Dubai via hawala channel.
The investigation agencdy claimed that the Dawood gang is involved in terrori-sm, criminal activities, arms smuggling, narco-terrorism, money laundering, circulation of fake currency, unauthorised acquisition of assets for raising terror funds and is working in close collaboration with international terrorist organizations, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Al Qaeda.
Earlier, the ED had questioned Chhota Shakeel’s brother-in-law Salim Qureshi alias Salim Fruit after raiding his premises, along with five other places in the money-laundering case.
