Nothing on Dubai man, they finally let him go

Hussaini did not figure in the wanted lists of any agency and neither was there any pending case against him. Sources said he was handed over to Mumbai police on Wednesday which later released him.

While the Ministry of External Affairs has taken up the matter with the UAE Government, sources said, no document has been received by New Delhi. Y.K. Sinha, India’s Consul-General in Dubai, refused to comment on the matter. ‘‘I am afraid I have no comment to offer in this case,’’ he said when contacted over the telephone.

For someone accused of selling the country’s nuclear secrets, Hussaini was never considered hot property by any investigating agency. He was booked on an Air-India flight for Mumbai by Dubai police without informing the crew. That the Government had been informed through diplomatic channels of his deportation helped security officials at the airport to detain him before he left the premises.

Hussaini’s questioning too took twists and turns as he claimed that he was deported because he fell apart with his business partner, one Col. Obaid Al Awabed. Husaini says he used to deal in watches, garments and leather goods through a company run jointly by him and the Colonel.

According to him, Awabed was involved in a visa racket and when Hussaini asked him to share the spoils of this illegal business, Awabed apparently used his influence with the UAE Government and had his business visa cancelled.

However, Hussaini is not totally new to Indian agencies. He had been allegedly approaching several missions in India and abroad with documents that he claimed contained India’s nuclear secrets. In fact, he is said to have got in touch with the United States government in the early 1990s.

It later turned out that Hussaini did not hold any sensitive documents with him. What he had were apparently sketches he had improvised from material downloaded from the internet. He also approached missions of several Islamic countries like Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

He apparently also wrote a letter to some officials in the Oman government which has now been handed over to India. But his claims, sources said, were false and that the documents were not authentic.

His brother, who was reported to be a nuclear scientist, turned out to be a doctor residing in Safdarjang Enclave. And on hearing about his brother’s deportation, Syed Adil Hussaini left for Mumbai on Monday where he filed a habeas corpus petition.

Maharashtra’s counsel for the second day running told Bombay High Court that the state was clueless with regards to the whereabouts of Hussain or the agency that had detained him. ‘‘I cannot exactly say for sure,’’ was the reply to the court’s enquiries about Hussaini. A bench of Justice S S Parkar and Justice Ranjana Desai have asked the state and the Union to get back to the court on Friday with answers.