Mohammad Habeeb Zahir, the retired Lt Colonel of the Pakistan Army who disappeared from Lumbini near Nepal’s border with India and now suspected to be in Indian custody, was in the team that nabbed Kulbhushan Jadhav in March 2016. Sources in the security establishment have told The Indian Express that Indian agencies had been on Zahir’s trail for long and managed to detain him in the first week of April near the Nepal border. Monday’s announcement of the Pakistan military court’s decision to award the death penalty to Jadhav, sources said, was to stop the Indian government from going public with the arrest of the Pakistan Army officer.
“Zahir was nabbed on April 3 on the Indo-Nepal border. He was heading the team that had trailed Jadhav and there is definitely a connection between the two cases,” an officer said. “No sooner did the Pakistani authorities learn of Zahir’s detention, Jadhav was pronounced guilty of being a spy. The purpose is clear. They didn’t want the Indian agency to go public with the news of the arrest of a Pakistan Army man,” the officer said.
Zahir retired from the Pakistan Army on December 31, 2014 but was said to have been engaged thereafter by the ISI for its covert operations. In 2015, he picked up conversations between Jadhav and his family members and started tracking him, sources said.
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“Jadhav used an Indian passport issued in the name of Hussain Mubarak Patel to carry out his dhow business in Iran. However, the Pakistani agencies heard him speak to his family members in Marathi. Zahir started trailing Jadhav. A trap was laid and Jadhav was apprehended in March 2016,” the officer said.
Sources said Indian agencies lured Zahir to Nepal by promising him another “big catch”, this time from the Indian Army. The man who turned in Zahir connected with him through a UK number to pass on “information on a mole”. He met Zahir a couple of times in Oman.
“Zahir arrived in Oman on April 2 and reached Kathmandu the next day. On his arrival in Nepal, he was handed over a SIM card at Bhairawa in Nepal. Zahir was told that this was to facilitate his communication with the pointperson in India. From here he was made to travel to Lumbini near the border. The team waiting there took him into custody,” the officer said.
Zahir’s family also told the press in Pakistan that he was likely picked by an “enemy” agency. A PTI report from Islamabad on Monday said Zahir’s son Saad lodged an FIR with Rawat police station near Rawalpindi, saying his father was received by one Javed Ansari in Nepal who took him to Lumbini.
“We suspect that my father has been abducted and enemy spy agencies might be responsible for it,” a police official quoted Saad as saying.
