Yet another blast accused killed in busy Dongri

Yet another blast accused killed in busy Dongri
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

APRIL 3: Two men opened fire on a busy street in Dongri killing yet another serial bomb blast accused this morning.

An eyewitness said that the shooters, cradling revolvers, stopped on the road as Akbarkhan Abushama alias Akbar Lala turned around near the `beedi' shop on the Mohammed Omer Kokil junction at Dongri in south Mumbai. One of the gunmen shot six rounds before he and his accomplice jumped onto the motorcycle and escaped, recalled the eyewitness.

Abushama, 30, who took six bullets in the chest, jaw and groin fell on the pavement about three feet from the shop. A thin pool of blood spurted over the sidewalk as bystanders ran helter-skelter for cover with the sound of exploding bullets.

A police patrol van rushed Abushama to hospital a few minutes later, however he was decalared dead before admission to J J Hospital. Life in the neighbourhood was normal an hour after the incident.

``I did not see anything. My young son was at the counter,''said Mohammed, the beedi shop owner.

While some eyewitnesses say there were two shooters, others say they saw two others stalking Abushama a few meters from the scene of the crime. ``The shooters escaped in the direction of Opera House,''said an eyewitness.

The police say the assailants must have been tracking Abushama's movements for the past few weeks. He used to visit the beedi shop every morning after buying bread from a nearby bakery.

Prelimnary investigations have revealed that members of the rival Chhota Rajan gang could be behind the shootout. The suspicion stems from the fact that the shooter's identity matches with Yusuf Bachkana, a Rajan hitman.

The sequence of events were familar to that of Hanif Kadawala's murder on February 7. The shooters were using .38 caliber revolvers, usually used by the Chhota Rajan gang.

The victim, a bomb blast accused, was released on bail in 1995. It is still not clear whether he was still working for the Karachi-based don Dawood Ibrahim.

Police sources informed that he was a close relative of Bahrain-based gangster Ejaz Pathan. Pathan himself is wanted in connection with the serial bomb blast.

Abushama was arrested on March 29, 1993 after the city was rocked by aseries of bomb blasts a few days earlier. He is accused of landing the RDX and some sophisticated weapons at Dighi beach in Raigad district on February 7 the same year.

Key bomb blast accused Tiger Memon first hired the rustic Pathan as a bodyguard in late 1992. Abushama was soon motivated to double up as a landing agent responsible for offloanding and transporting the deadly consignment to Mumbai in the first week of March 1993.