TOI

Mumbai, Aug 23: Karimullah Osan Habib Khan (centre) is taken away from the court by police in Mumbai MUMBAI: Dawood aide Karimullah Habib Khan is singing. A day after being arrested from Nalasopara, where he had assumed a new name and a new vocation, the man who shepherded the RDX consignment to their deadly end in March 1993 has spilled details of his boss' lifestyle in Pakistan.

Khan told the police that Dawood Ibrahim's palatial bungalow in the tony Clifton neighbourhood in Karachi is guarded by six retired officers from the Pakistan army. Khan, who was with the underworld don's brother Anees after he fled Mumbai in June 1993, said Dawood had also deployed 25 private security guards to protect himself and his family.

Going by Khan's statement to the police, in recent years, Dawood prefers to mostly remain indoors during the day. He stays with his wife and a son in the bungalow located on a two-acre plot. He moves around in a bullet-proof Land Cruiser and steps out mostly in the night, that too not without a convoy of 15 vehicles guarding him.

While Dawood and Anees stay in the Clifton area, his close aide Shakeel stays a kilometre away, according to Khan. Quoting Khan, a police officer said, "The bungalow is equipped with luxuries__a home theatre, servant quarters, a garden for children with high boundary walls, a pool centre and a swimming pool. There is everything that one can think of."

Dawood heavily relies on Chhota Shakeel although Anees is still part of his inner circle. All three stay separately in independent bungalows. Dawood runs his empire like a company and no one dares challenge his authority. Khan told the police that Dawood is only worried about his third brother Noora, who is mentally disturbed and picks up fights over petty issues.

Dawood's other brothers, Mustaqium and Humayun, who are based in Dubai, keep visiting him in Karachi and stay with him. Khan denied any knowledge about Dawood's extortion threats to Bollywood, but confirmed that Anees had ordered the killing of music magnate Gulshan.

Speaking about himself, Khan said that it was Ejaz Pathan who got him into the Dawood gang. He said that his father Habib used to work as a loader with the Bombay Port Trust in the late 1980s. Khan was operating as a petty scrap thief in the docks when he met Pathan, a silver smuggler.

Their trade skills so impressed absconding blast accused Tiger Memon that he assigned them the job of landing RDX on the Shekhadi coast. Khan said that immediately after the serial blasts, he fled to Dubai along with Anees and stayed there.