Mumbai serial blasts mastermind fugitive Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Iqbal Kaskar has been arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) in Mumbai on Wednesday in a case related to inter-state drug supply. At present Iqbal Kaskar was out on parole and was arrested in 2018 for running an extortion racket.

According to ANI, Kaskar has been detained for allegedly peddling banned drug substances from Jammu and Kashmir to Punjab.

Kaskar is linked to recent seizures by the NCB in which drugs were being transported from Kashmir to Mumbai. The Mumbai Police and NCB had raided several locations in the city and the links of the drug syndicate led to Iqbal Kaskar. According to reports, the drug syndicate involved the transport of drugs by bike-borne peddlers from Kashmir to Mumbai.

Earlier this month, the NCB had arrested drug peddler Haris Khan over his alleged links with gangster Parvez Khan alias Chinku Pathan, an associate of Dawood Ibrahim.

In January this year, a team of NCB had arrested Arif Bhujwala from Raigarh, in connection with the Mumbai drug case. Arif Bhujwal is believed to have close relations with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. Bhujwala was the key mastermind of the Rs 300-crore annual drugs syndicate which he ran with the help of underworld mentors in Dubai.

Iqbal Kaskar is the younger brother of notorious underworld don Dawood Ibrahim who is in Pakistan under the protection of the ISI. Iqbal fled the country with Dawood along with Anees in 1993 just before the Mumbai serial blasts on March 12, 1993.

Ten year later, in 2003, Iqbal was deported from Dubai to India to stand trial in two cases–a murder case and the Sara Sahara illegal construction case. He was acquitted in both cases in 2007. After being deported, he made the Damarwala residence of the Dawood family as his home.

Iqbal, Dawood’s fifth sibling, was arrested in 2015 for running an extortion racket. During interrogations, he had told the police that he had spoken to Dawood’s wife Mehjabeen on his wife Rizwana Hasan’s phone when the two women met in Dubai in 2016.

At that time, Iqbal Kaskar has also told the investigators that a deeply worried Dawood is afflicted by bouts of despondency over who would look after and handle his vast underworld empire in the future.

More so, as his other brother Anees Ibrahim Kaskar is now ageing and reportedly not in robust health, other brothers are deceased and no reliable close relatives available to take over the reins of the empire. According to Kaskar, his nephew and Dawood’s son Moin, after becoming a Maulana ‘Hafiz-e-Quran', having memorized the entire Holy Quran left his father’s palatial bungalow in Clifton area in the posh Saddar suburb of Karachi and opted to live a mendicant's life in a mosque adjacent to their home, leaving Dawood angry and depressed.

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