IT Correspondent
Mumbai, June 17:
The Mumbai bomb blasts (12 March 1993) accused underworld don Dawood Ibrahim’s aide Chhota Shakeel’s elder sister Hamida Sayyed passed away due to novel coronavirus infection in Mumbra in Thane district of Maharashtra on Tuesday.
Shakeel’s other sister Fahmida died due to pneumonia, in a hospital in Mira Road near Mumbai on 22 May,2020. At that time, her driver Altaf was tested positive. After that Fahmida’s husband Arif Aboobakar Sheikh’s bungalow in Thane, was sealed off by the Thane municipal commissioner.
Arif Aboobakar Sheikh who had fled to Dubai after the murder of Gujarat BJP MLA Haren Pandya in Ahmedabad in 2003, was deported to India. But he was acquitted in 2006.
The members of the crime syndicate run by Dawood, along with his key aide Ibrahim Mushtaq Abdul Razzaq Memon (Tiger Memon), Yakub Memon, Mohammed Dossa, Mustafa Dossa and Chhota Shakeel had plotted the dastardly attacks on Mumbai. They had also organised training camps in Pakistan and in India to impart and undergo weapon and arms training and handling of explosives, the prosecution said.
The blasts snuffed out the lives of 257 people. Though the hearing of the bomb blast case began in 2007, it was delayed as three simultaneous petitions were pending with the Supreme Court, one each filed by Dossa and Salem, and another by CBI. In the first leg of the trial that concluded in 2007, the TADA court had convicted 100 accused, while 23 people were acquitted. In 2013, the Supreme Court sentenced Yakub Memon to death. He was executed on 39 July, 2015.
Now it is believed that Chhota Shakeel is currently holding up in Karachi with his family. Recently some media reports suggested that Dawood Ibrahim had died due to Covid-19 infection but no intelligence report can confirm his death.
