Mirza Dilshad Beg
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Mirza Dilshad Beg | |
|---|---|
| مرزا دلشاد بیگ | |
| Personal details | |
| Died | June 29, 1998 |
| Manner of death | Assassination |
| Party | Rastriya Prajatantra Party |
Mirza Dilshad Beg (died June 29, 1998) was an assassinated Indian-Nepali parliamentarian. He had links with Dawood Ibrahim's D-company, a criminal syndicate. He was shot dead in Siphal, Kathmandu in Nepal.
Hailing from Deoria near Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, Mirza began his forays into the underworld around late eighties. He grew in notoriety through car thefts, assault, kidnapping and of course murders; he later thought of his antecedents as petty crimes.[1]
Involvement with the underworld
Mirza's graduation to the big league began after a chance meeting with Dawood Ibrahim in Mumbai in the early eighties, when both were struggling to carve a niche for themselves in India. Besides Dawood, Mirza also had links with Chhota Rajan, Chhota Shakeel, the brothers Amar and Ashwin Naik and members of the Pathan syndicate. However, he shot to prominence only after his association with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence operatives in India and Nepal.
The porous Indo-Nepal border helped him sneak in and out of his home state and into Nepal. From then on, his notoriety grew so much that the UP police announced a reward for his arrest.
Political career in Nepal
Beg, the elusive crook found Kathmandu safer than UP. Dawood's reputation of transforming crooks into kings in India also helped him in Nepal. Playing the communal card in the election, Mirza represented the Muslim minority in Hindu-majority Nepal and won with a thumping majority. Beg had been elected to the House of Representatives in Kapilvastu District in 1994 and held ministerial portfolios in two governments.[2][3]
He resigned from the Nepal Sadbhawana Party, and joined the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party, winning two consecutive terms from the Kapilavastu constituency in south-west Nepal. Finally, his shady past became his nemesis and began to erode his popularity as a politician. Mumbai's Crime Branch officers believed that Mirza regularly used his Krishna Nagar mansion to shelter gangsters on the run from Indian enforcement agencies.
His residence was also used for other illegal activities including confinement of abductees, drug-trafficking, gun-running and forging of documents.
He was so effective that Dawood, whose reach had spread from Dubai to Karachi and Colombo to London, regarded Kathmandu as his strongest base. In fact the mafia don even considered shifting to Kathmandu for a while, following the Gulshan Kumar murder. The Indian government had tried to extradite his lieutenant Abu Salem for the murder and had turned the heat on the UAE government to secure Salem's custody. However, it was Mirza's declining clout which forced him to change his mind, making him opt for the ISI sanctuary in Karachi.
Mirza's greed turned him towards gun-running, smuggling arms procured from the Afghan Mujahedins and the ISI, into India.
Mirza's exploits allegedly include an aborted bid on the life of UP Chief Minister Kalyan Singh in Nainital. Mirza's murder had also stunned the Mumbai underworld as most fugitives had, at some point in time, used Mirza's good offices for passage out of the country.