Indian security agencies jittery over D-company threat to Delhi

The anxiety over D-company is based on an input that Ibrahim "Tiger" Memon – the main accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case – had a meeting with ISI to discuss plans to attack soft targets in Delhi.

Updated on: Jun 2, 2014, 02:40:47 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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The Indian security establishment is keeping a close watch over Dawood Ibrahim’s plans to target the Capital even as recent talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif signal forward movement in normalising bilateral relations.

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The security agencies’ anxiety over D-company is based on an intelligence input that Ibrahim "Tiger" Memon – the main accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case – had a meeting with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in Islamabad around May 15 to discuss plans to engineer blasts and attack soft targets in Delhi.

The attack is said to be designed to test the newly-appointed Prime Minister’s capacity to tackle terror. Memon is based in Karachi and is part of the vast D-company network in south Asia and the Middle-East.

More than one senior home ministry official told HT that they had received the intelligence input and were checking it.

According to the input, Memon was tasked with diverting money to India through Delhi and not the usual Mumbai route for targeting the Capital. The intelligence lead has been shared at the highest levels with security agencies and efforts are on to monitor cross-border movement of money through the hawala or underworld route.

“We are trying to verify this terror input but, as of now, it still stands uncorroborated. This may turn out to be one of the many leads that lead to no result. But we are taking this threat seriously and are using technical aid to cross-check this meeting,” said a senior counter-terror official with the home ministry on condition of anonymity.

Though Pakistan denies sheltering Dawood Ibrahim, there are enough technical inputs with the Indian security establishment to pin the mafia don’s location to Karachi. He is also known to have business interests in real estate in Mumbai, Maharashtra and Dubai.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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