Late on the afternoon of November 23, 2008, a brightly-painted fishing boat from Porbandar pulled up alongside the Karachi-registered merchant ship al-Husaini. Four members of the Kuber's crew were shot dead as they came on board. Its captain Amar Singh Solanki was then forced to pilot the ship and 10 Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists to the bay off Mumbai's southern tip — where his throat was slit minutes before the 26/11 attacks began.
Precisely what led the fishing boat to the al-Husaini remains one of 26/11's last unsolved mysteries. But based on information gathered from fishing crews in Maharashtra and Gujarat, investigators now believe the Kuber's crew was lured to their death, like the fish they hunted.
The bait was fuel: diesel smuggled out of Iran, and sold by Karachi-based organised crime groups for half its Indian onshore price. Faced with declining catches and high operating costs, crew on hundreds of boats in India's 1,80,000-strong fishing fleet supplement their income by running bootleg fuel.
The Porbandar port authorities say Kuber brought in a 1,000 kg catch when it docked overnight on November 13. It had just 50 kg on board when it was found floating off Mumbai after 26/11 — a poor haul that possibly led Solanki into seeking to buy smuggled fuel from al-Husaini.
In the three years since 26/11, despite multicrore investments in coastal security, the scale of smuggling has grown — and with it, the threat to India's cities.
“Let me put it this way,” says a senior Mumbai Police official, “it just isn't possible for us to search each boat that enters each port. Each boat, though, poses a potential threat.”
Muhammad Khan, fugitive owner of al-Husaini, would likely have known that the Lashkar hit-squad would have little trouble luring an Indian fishing boat to take it, unnoticed, into Mumbai. Khan, India's intelligence services believe, used his Karachi-registered merchant fleet to run contraband across the Indian Ocean. Al-Husaini captain Shahid Ghafoor is also thought to have been a veteran trafficker, shipping cargo for organised crime groups.
For much of their careers, men like Khan and Ghafoor ran gold, electronics and narcotics — but in recent years, there has been much more money to be made in trafficking the black, foul-smelling fluid.
Petrol and diesel smuggling into Pakistan has been booming ever since the middle of the last decade, spurred on by record oil prices. Fuel smuggled from Iran is widely available in Pakistan's cities: in Karachi, smuggled petrol is reported to retail for between Rs.34 and Rs.38 a litre, and diesel for between Rs.28 and Rs.32. In Quetta, Iranian petrol and diesel, both retail for Rs.30 and Rs.33, while consumers in the port town of Gwadar can buy it for as little as Rs.24 and Rs.30. In towns like Taftan, along the Iran-Pakistan border, prices can run as low as Rs.20.
Iranian petrol and diesel thus retail for just half, or even a third, of the post-tax legal price in Pakistan — which has, unsurprisingly, led public transport operators to switch over to smuggled fuel on an ever-larger scale.
Earlier this year, Pakistan's Sarhad Petroleum Cartage and Dealers' Association, a trade body, publicly warned the government it would be compelled to start selling smuggled fuel. Mansoor Sharif, an Association official, told journalists that sales at petrol pumps in the Balochistan province had in some cases dropped to just 50 litres a day.
Last year, the Mumbai Police held alleged ganglord Muhammad Ali Sheikh, who is now being tried for the murder of his key rival, Saiyyad Madar Chand —breaking, they claimed, the diesel mafia's backbone. There is plenty of evidence, though, that the trade goes on: Ever since February this year, the police have made 49 arrests related to fuel-smuggling and seized nine boats. In an August 2011 case alone, the police recovered a staggering 50,000 litres.
India is investing a staggering Rs. 5.23 billion on an ambitious coastal security programme — not counting Rs. 63.3 million paid to the Coast Guard for building three new bases, Rs. 627.7 million for new ships it will operate, and separate investments in the Navy's capacities — fishing boats have yet to be mandatorily fitted with equipment that will record their movements.
India's failure to learn from past experience enabled Kuber's tragic 26/11 voyage. Fishing boats engaged in the narcotics trade carried the explosives and weapons used in the 1993 serial bombings. Little effort was made to improve monitoring of the fleet, though — and 26/11, it would seem, changed little.
Published - November 30, 2011 01:42 am IST
