India asks UNSC to act against Dawood Ibrahim, D-Company, calls them ‘real danger’


India on Tuesday asked the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to initiate action against mafia don-turned terrorist Dawood Ibrahim and his “terror organisation” D-Company, responsible for the 1993 bombings in Mumbai that killed 257 people.

India’s Ambassador and Permanent Representative to United Nations in UN Security Council, Syed Akbaruddin on Tuesday said Ibrahim and the D-Company posed “a real and present danger”.

In an indirect attack on Pakistan, he said the D-Company’s “illegitimate economic activities”, known very little by the outside world, “such as gold smuggling, counterfeit currency, arms and drug trafficking from a safe haven that declines to acknowledge even his existence, are a real and present danger”.

Riding on India’s success of getting the UNSC committee to declare Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) chief Masood Azhar a global terrorist, Akbaruddin called for action against proscribed individuals, such as Dawood Ibrahim and his D-Company and proscribed entities, including the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), listed as affiliates of Al-Qaeda, under the 1267 sanctions regime.

The Indian ambassador called for collective action against these entities as one carried out against the ISIS.

In a huge diplomatic win for India, the UNSC in May designated Masood Azhar as a “global terrorist” after China lifted its hold on a proposal to blacklist the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed chief, a decade after New Delhi approached the world body for the first time on the issue.

China lifted technical hold after it found no objection to the listing proposal following a careful study of the “revised materials.”

The UN committee listed Azhar on May 1, 2019 as being associated with Al-Qaeda for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing, or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf of, or in support of”, “supplying, selling or transferring arms and related material to”, “recruiting for”, “otherwise supporting acts or activities of”, and “other acts or activities indicating association with” the JeM.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi, according to a report in IANS, said that her country will continue to act to “sever the vicious link between terrorism and organized crime in our region”.