D-link gets life in jail

Swati Deshpande / TNN / May 31, 2007, 04:46 IST

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He kept his word to underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and landed a cache of arms, ammunitions and RDX along the porous Raigad coast in early 1993.

MUMBAI: He kept his word to underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and landed a cache of arms, ammunitions and RDX along the porous Raigad coast in early 1993. The cache was later used to perpetrate the March 12, 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai, which killed 257 people and injured over 700.
As punishment, Dawood Phanse was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment (RI) for life on Wednesday by the Tada court.As the main landing agent, Phanse received Rs 15 lakh, including money to pay government officials.
Phanse met Dawood, himself a key absconding accused in the case, on January 20, 1993 in Dubai. On February 3 and 9 of 1993, the RDX was landed via the sea route from Pakistan.
Phanse has been in jail for the past 14 years, barring 11 months when he was out on medical bail.

Judge P D Kode noted that Phanse's own confession stated that Dawood wanted to send arms and explosives to India and wanted revenge for the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The court read out three sentences on three separate counts for Phanse. He got life imprisonment twice and 14 years of RI along with a fine of Rs 2 lakh.
Phanse did not visibly react on hearing his sentence, but simply walked back to his bench at the back of the court after the constable escorting him tried to assist him down from the dock.

Muzammil Umar Kadri broke into tears on hearing his life sentence for concealing 13 AK-56 rifles and helping with the arms and RDX landing and transportation operations. He was also guilty of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. He too is a resident of Raigad and got sentenced on three counts—twice to life imprisonment and once to 10 years of RI. The judge also fined Kadri Rs 1.25 lakh. He has spent three-and-a-half years in jail.
His uncle, Khalil Nazir, 59, who got 10 years of RI, had helped with the landings and had stored two imported pistols illegally. The judge held that he was not party to the blasts' conspiracy. Both he and Kadri had been released on bail in 1995, but now the latter won't walk out with his ‘mama'.
Two other men got six years of RI and were fined Rs 50,000 each. Mohammed Dawood Yusuf Khan and 50-year-old Mohammed Yunus Botomiya, who spent over three years in jail as undertrials, will now have to spend about three more years in prison. The duo's crime was that they possessed AK-56 rifles. Khan had two, which were given to him by co-accused Ejaz Pathan, and Botomiya had one, which he hid on a terrace.
The court sentenced three others to the minimum five years in jail. Two—Aziz Ahmed Shaikh and Salim Khan Durani alias Salim Tonk—possessed arms illegally. They were also fined Rs 25,000 each. Aziz Ahmed, who is now 48, is a nautical engineer and worked in a US-based merchant naval company before the blasts. The police recovered a US carbine from him which he had hidden in Nariyalwadi Kabrastan in Mazgaon. He is likely to challenge his conviction in the Supreme Court, as is Durani, who is also a political party leader in Mumbai and hails from the royal Tonk family in Rajasthan.
The judge said Aziz was not entitled to a release on probation as he was guilty under Tada.
Kode was all praise for Durani's lawyer Majeed Memon's legal submissions for a minimum sentence. He said Memon's was the "best defence submissions" and he accepted them by awarding the lowest sentence of five years' RI to Durani, from whose factory in Andheri a weapon was recovered post blasts.
The last man sentenced was Liyakat Ali Khan, 49, who has spent three years and two months in jail and suffers from schizophrenia.
His illness was a buffer against a longer sentence. He got five years' RI and a Rs 35,000 fine for using his
father's godown to store explosives. Khan has four children, lives in Bandra and is supported by his parents. He wanted to speak but the judge waved him away.
swati.deshpande@timesgroup.com

About the Author

Swati Deshpande

Swati Deshpande is Senior editor at The Times of India, Mumbai, where she has been covering courts for over a decade. She is passionate about law and works towards enlightening people about their statutory, legal and fundamental rights. She makes it her job to decipher for the public the truth, be it in an intricate civil dispute or in a gruesome criminal case.

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