Two days after Jaan Mohammed Shaikh, alias Sameer Kaliya, was arrested by the Delhi special cell for plotting a terror attack in the national capital the officials learnt that the accused was reportedly sent to Bahrain in 2019 on an assignment by the Dawood gang, also known as the D-Company.
According to the Mumbai crime branch officials, Kaliya was given a contract to kill a notorious extortionist Ali Budesh.
The police said that Chota Shakeel’s close aide Fahim Machmach, who died in Pakistan recently, had given him the contract and had arranged Kaliya’s Bahrain visit. However, he could not execute the plan and returned empty-handed fearing his own life. According to the officials, Budesh was well settled in Bahrain for the last 30 years. So it wasn’t easy to eliminate him.
Budesh used to be an extortionist and was attached to the D-Company. He was mostly active in the 1990s after which he fled to Bahrain. He later moved out of the gang along with Dawood’s key aides and they vowed to kill him.
He is also known to be an informer for the law-enforcement agencies on the D-Company. In 1996, Dawood Ibrahim brother Anees Ibrahim was detained at Bahrain international airport in Muharraq. This tip-off is said to be given by Budesh.
Kaliya’s connection with the underworld is also not new and he was on our radar, said the anti-terrorism squad’s (ATS) chief Vineet Agarwal on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the ATS and city crime branch sleuths are already in Delhi to interrogate him. According to the senior officials, the central agencies had alerted the Delhi special cell about the six accused and their terror plan a couple of days before the incident. Since then, the cops were keeping a close eye on them.
