Gangster Mustafa Dossa allegedly held auditions for models on court premises in Mumbai
In an incident worthy of a movie script, a gangster facing trial in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case held auditions for models at a Mumbai court earlier this month.
Mustafa Dossa, a close aide of Dawood Ibrahim, interviewed eight women for a modelling job with a Dubai-based jewellery shop. He has been in jail since 2003 and is facing trial in several cases. In 2010, he had attacked Gangster Abu Salem with a spoon inside the city's Arthur Road jail.
Sources say the gangster shortlisted three models and paid them a signing amount. But one of the models was later robbed of the money and her mobile phone by Dossa's aide, and that is how the incident was revealed.
The police say the gangster's aide got his friends to dress up as policemen. They allegedly told the model to retrieve her phone from the crime branch unit. When she showed up, the whole story came out.
Three persons have been arrested.
That Mustafa Dossa could preside over auditions on the sidelines of a court hearing shows that he could just as easily have escaped, says a former Mumbai police chief.
"Police should not take any risks while escorting a hardened criminal like him. The fact the models were paraded shows how easy access there is to him and this is dangerous to society, as someone may attempt to eliminate him or he may try to escape," retired IPS officer Sudhakar Suradkar, a former Inspector General of Police, told NDTV.