The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is busy preparing the 14th sheet related to the March 1993 Bombay blast case. Bureau officials, who are burning the proverbial midnight oil to draft the document, are confident that with the clutch of new evidence they have now managed to acquire, they will be able to convincingly nail Pakistan's involvement in the serial blasts which shook the megapolis three months after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
The Bureau sleuths have now finished plodding through the heaps of documents made available to them by the Thailand authorities. The documents made available to them by the Thailand authorities. The documents detail the false aliases provided to almost the entire Memon family and the passports (in some cases two sets each) by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).
The new documents in hand reveal that just four days after the series of bomb blasts in Bombay, Ibrahim Razak (Tiger Memon), the mastermind behind the crime, had become a new man. He had been given another identity and was now called Ahmed Jamal and had been issued a Pakistani passport bearing the number AA-762402. The passport had been issued in Islamabad on March 16, 1993. To confuse the trail, Tiger Memon was subsequently issued another passport (AB-862434).
According to investigations conducted in Thailand, and corroborated by Interpol, Tiger Memon and most of his family members were provided with two sets of Pakistani passports. Some of these were obtained quite easily by the CBI when some members of the family “surrendered” last year after the arrest of Yakub Memon. But details of Tiger's passports have only now become known and are considered crucial for the trial that will now take place.
It was on the basis of these very passports that some of the Memon family members, including Tiger, his wife Shabana, his brother Ayub Razak and the latter's wife Reshma, were provided with visas at the Thai Embassy in Islamabad. Of course, none of the passports were in their own names. Memon and his wife, according to the documents received by the Bureau from the Thailand authorities, left Karachi for Bangkok by Thai Airways fight number TG 502 on April 17. His wife, Shabana returned to Karachi on April 29 by flight number TG 507. The couple also travelled to Singapore on June 28, 1994, (flight number SQ 417) from Karachi. They left Singapore on July 2 the same year. It was obvious that the Memons had a free run in and out of Pakistan with the full cooperation of the authorities. This time they were travelling on the second set of passports provided to them by the Pakistani authorities.
The documents also indicate that the ISI had deputed a senior intelligence functionary, Mohd Sarvar, to escort the Memons to Thailand where they were put up on the outskirts of Bangkok. The entire group's identity had been changed.
Tiger Memon and his wife Shabana Memon stayed in Singapore till July 2 and returned by flight number SQ-428 to Karachi. One month later, Yakub Memon was nabbed and brought to India. His arrest, however, was made public only on August 5, in New Delhi, with the Government accusing Pakistani of having harboured the Memon family. In a hurriedly convened press conference, the Government produced, among other things, Yakub's Pakistani passport issued in the name of Yousuf Ahmed to prove that Pakistan was very much involved in the Bombay bomb blast case. But Pakistan contemptuously brushed aside the allegations and charged that Yakub had “come out of the closets of North Block.”
Now, with the fresh set of documents provided to it by a neutral country, the CBI sleuths are pretty much sanguine that Pakistan will not be able to deny its involvement with the Memon family. After that, of course, the diplomats will have to take over to campaign against Pakistan's support to terrorists.
