Arun GawliBy all accounts, it was an extraordinary performance. In a city jaded by the exploits of underworld dons, no one had quite anticipated last fortnight's development.Asha Gawli, the wife of one of Bombay's most notorious gangsters, Arun Gawli, who is locked in a bloody feud with rival Dawood Ibrahim, called a press conference at the Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh and alleged that the Dubai-based crime lord had paid off the city police to murder her husband.There is an enormous amount of bad blood between Dawood and Gawli, whose mentor, Rama Naik, was killed in a police encounter in 1988. It was after Naik's death that Gawli took over the gang, which allegedly operates from the notorious Dagdi chawl and has a fearsome reputation for contract killings and extortion.The central Bombay chawl, a beehive of 250 lower middle class tenements fortified with huge iron gates, provides a safe refuge not only against the police but also marauding rival gangsters.The Ibrahim and Gawli gangs have been shooting at each other for several years, and Gawli has even lost a brother in the warfare. Though Gawli was arrested in 1990 and lodged in Pune's Yeravada Jail, he is said to be conducting criminal activities from inside the prison walls with impunity.Asha GawliThe latest sensational crime in which his gang has been implicated is the contract killing of prominent Muslim leader and former legislator Ziauddin Bukhari.According to one theory, both Bukhari and BJP MLA Prem Kumar Sharma were killed by the same shadowy "Foreign hand" hiring rival Hindu and Muslim gangs to eliminate the leaders and create further communal chaos in the metropolis.In a highly successful investigation, the police arrested 14 associates of Gawli allegedly linked to the Bukhari contract killing, and seized several weapons and ammunition. Soon after the arrests, Asha Gawli went public and charged that her husband was being falsely implicated in the Bukhari murder.But the Bombay Police Commissioner A.S. Samra's response was forthright. ''They always try to find some way to run down the police," he stated. Samra maintained that the time had come to stop Gawli from conducting operations from behind the prison walls.The police feel they have a very good case against Gawli, and may even try to get him transferred to solitary confinement to check his underworld activities.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Jul 31, 1993 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---
