Most wanted, most elusive

The list of India8217;s 20 most wanted men is now a much-circulated document internationally. If there8217;s only one thing that is stopping India from ticking off some names from the list and bringing them before the Indian courts, it is the excruciating process of extradition. And never have Indian investigating agencies, led by the Central Bureau of Investigation CBI, come face to face with the pitfalls of the process as they did last week.

First, after 12 long years of the Bofors case investigation, the CBI had to face the ignominy of Kuala Lumpur High Court judge Augustine Paul dismissing its appeal for the extradition of Ottavio Quattrocchi. While CBI Director P C Sharma described the order as 8216;8216;disturbing8217;8217; see interview, the agency8217;s chief prosecutor N Natarajan was even more candid. 8216;8216;The order is inexplicable and not in accordance with law. Our case was dismissed because charges were not framed. But how could charges be framed when the accused had not turned up for trial?8217;8217; he demanded, speaking to The Sunday Express from Chennai.

If Ottavio Quattrocchi has managed to avoid the trial court in the landmark Bofors pay-off case so far, for the CBI8217;s other star accused Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar8217;s brother Anees Ibrahim, it is the trial court that was set up for the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. Nor are these the only setbacks 2002 has brought for the CBI. Three months ago, notorious Mumbai gangster Abu Salem was arrested in Lisbon; his extradition papers could only be processed and sent on the very day that Quattrocchi8217;s extradition request was turned down and Anees Ibrahim released on bail.

Natarajan, who is also the Chief Prosecutor in the Mumbai bomb blast cases, says that though India has an extradition treaty in place with the UAE, they had hoped Anees would be deported. 8216;8216;But now we have another prolonged extradition process ahead of us,8217;8217; he rues. 8216;8216;The UAE authorities have said that Anees was wanted for a murder in their own country and that in an earlier case bail had been granted in similar circumstances.8217;8217;

So, will the much-hyped cooperation pact between the UAE and India be limited to relatively inconsequential criminals? The answer will become clearer in the coming months, but till date, the CBI has succeeded in extraditing only one major criminal from anywhere in the world. Gangster Babloo Srivastava was extradited by the CBI from Singapore; he is still in jail in India. The other 8216;8216;arrivals8217;8217; from Dubai 8212; including Aftab Ansari, Raju Anadkat and Muthappa Rai 8212; were all deportees. It was the relative ease with which they were released by the UAE that had made officials hopeful of getting Anees too.

As a quid pro quo, in May, India too deported a criminal wanted by the UAE. The accused in question was a woman named Roshan Ansari, who is alleged to have murdered her step-daughter in Dubai. After committing the crime, she fled to Mumbai but was deported. In the case of Abu Salem, top officials have pointed out that getting hold of Salem wouldn8217;t be as much of a pushover as, say, getting hold of Ansari.

Inputs from S Ahmed Ali