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US pressure made UAE buckle
Rajeev Sharma and S. Satyanarayanan
Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 10
The UAE authorities took 18 days to deport a wanted criminal like Aftab Ansari, alias Farhan Ali, to India for the first time in 18 years and finally took the exceptional step of deporting, and not extraditing, Ansari because of intense American pressure.

According to well-placed sources here, there were differences between the UAE Crown Prince Gen Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid-al Makhtoom (who is also UAE’s Defence Minister), and King Zahid of Abu Dhabi over the deportation of Aftab Ansari, the prime suspect in the January 22 American Center attack in Kolkata.

While the Abu Dhabi King was in favour of Ansari’s deportation to India, the Crown Prince took a harder line. Significantly, two days after Aftab Ansari’s apprehension in Dubai, an Indian parliamentary delegation led by Sikandar Bakht had visited the UAE and Mr Bakht had delivered a sealed envelope containing a personal letter from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to the Abu Dhabi King.

The Crown Prince softened up his tough line because of persistent American pressure. It was because of this that even though Aftab Ansari was picked up by the UAE authorities in Dubai on January 23, the actual deportation materialised only yesterday.

The sources said in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks in America, Washington has taken an unambiguous and tough position against terrorism and has been at pains to say that there is nothing like “good terrorists” and “bad terrorists”.

In Ansari’s deportation, New Delhi has conveyed a point to the USA and Pakistan with one stroke. The USA because Aftab Ansari is understood to have confessed that the January 22 incident had dual objectives: to attack the American Centre as well as the West Bengal police. Washington had gone on record saying that it did not “categorise” the Kolkata case as an attack on America simply because no Americans had been killed or injured and no American property was damaged.

Pakistan has been given the message because Islamabad has, of late, been taking a funny stand whenever a sensational act of terrorism, having overtones of transnational crime, occurs, it accuses New Delhi of engineering it for painting Pakistan black. This is what Pakistan did during the December 25-31, 1999, hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC 814 and the December 13, 2001, attack on Indian Parliament. Ansari at the time of his apprehension was carrying a Pakistani passport (No J872142, issued in Lahore) and was going to catch a Dubai-Islamabad flight.

Besides, the sources said with the arrest of Ansari a major bid of the ISI to create another international don had been thwarted. The ISI is known for its penchant of not keeping all its eggs in one basket and believes in creating several power centres. This is what they have done in Jammu and Kashmir in shifting their loyalties from one terrorist outfit to another. Now when underworld don, Dawood Ibrahim, has come under limelight and is proving to be a liability for Islamabad, Aftab Ansari was the ISI’s “another egg in another basket”.