Dawood’s trusted woman in cop net

According to police, Fatima Mohammed Ali Khan—or Paro Vikram Parmar, to use her Hindu name—helped run operations, as well as received hawala tranfers to compensate families of underworld gangsters killed in police operations.

Fatima and her two sons were arrested in a pre-dawn swoop on their apartment in Amrut Nagar by the Thane and Ahmedabad police last week. They were part of a gang of eight held for consipiring to kill Gujarat Law Minister Ashok Bhatt and MLA Bharat Barot.

The Ahmedabad part of the operation was handled by another, equally unpretentious woman—Fatima’s sister-in-law Laxmi Hanumanprasad Nai (in her late 30s), her son Rajesh and brothers Manoj and Om Prakash.

When police came for them on Tuesday, in Mumbai and later Ahmedabad, all gave up quietly, without surprise or protest.

At the centre of this story is Vikram Parmar, a Dawood loyalist known as the ganglord’s recruiting agent and wanted in about eight charges of murder. After police caught up with him some time back, Parmar had fled, reportedly to Dhaka, and left the running of his operations to his wife, Fatima. Police believe Parmar earlier too used her to pass on Dawood’s messages to gang members while on the run.

All now face charges of conspiracy and waging war against the nation. More specifically, police say, Fatima was the conduit between Dawood and the henchmen he entrusted to kill Bhatt and Barot.

‘‘Fatima said their next target would have been Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Praveen Togadia,’’ says Assistant Inpector Mrutunjay Hiremath of the Thane Crime Branch.

Originally from Indore, Fatima was Paro when previously married to Jhansingh Maiskar, from whom she had her two sons, Alam Khan (27) alias Ajay Maiskar and Amir Khan (23) alias Vijay Maiskar. Around two decades ago, she began a steady relationship with Parmar, and hence with the D-company. She dumped Jhansingh, and later converted to Islam along with Parmar.

There was little the cops found at the ground-floor flat in Image Apartment to put Fatima and her sons apart from other numerous families living in Mumbra—not even a phone line.

To the neighbours, Fatima’s home was a zari unit, complete with equipment they never used. This, police believe, is what may have helped the three carry on their operations for eight years without their neighbours getting a whiff.

‘‘They were like any other urban family, not interacting much with others and never bothering anybody. In the eight years they have been our neigbhours, there is very little I know about them. I read in the newspapers that Fatima’s husband is Vikram Parmar,’’ says one of the neighbours.

Others even claim Fatima, who could sometimes be seen sitting with her grandchildren outside the house, had not been able to pay the monthly dues to the housing society for the past one year. ‘‘Being so poor how could she be involved in any crime?’’ asks one of them.

The cops, however, say they found hundreds of international phone receipts at the apartment. One of the numbers, they say, was the one currently used by Shakeel. Fatima is believed to have used her neighbour’s phone to receive incoming calls and the nearby communication centres to return them.

Parmar’s sister Laxmi’s front in Ahmedabad was her sons and other brothers, who worked as autorickshaw drivers. Off and on, police say, they would visit Mumbai to get in touch with Fatima and Parmar’s other associates. In fact, Laxmi’s husband is said to have broken up with her after learning that she organised some of her brother’s work. It was after this that she had left her husband’s house in Ujjain then and settled in Ahmedabad.

Parmar is believed to have hatched the conspiracy to eliminate Bhatt and Barot from Dhaka. While Laxmi and her family were to give the local support in Ahmedabad, Fatima was entrusted with selecting the shooters. These, however, were gunned down by police in Ahmedabad last June.

‘‘Laxmi and her family were entrusted with the task of providing shelter to the shooters and helping them obtain information about the targets,’’ says Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) D G Vanjara. Police recovered a 9 mm pistol of Chinese make, a .32 revolver of foreign make and 20 live cartridges from their house.

Incidentally, when Fatima lived in the heart of Mumbai earlier, she had been picked up on suspicion twice by the police but let off for lack of evidence. She had then shifted to Mumbra, a densely populated Muslim locality where, says Assistant Inspector Hiremath, she may have expected to find it simpler to melt into the crowd.