[Mr. Reddy was charged with illegal mining in Andhra Pradesh, after a Monday morning raid at his headquarters in Bellary. According to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, “several incriminating documents” were confiscated, as well as the cash and gold, itself worth more than $1 million. He was also charged with fraud and criminal conspiracy.]
NEW DELHI — One of India’s
most powerful mining barons, whose political clout and wealth have made him a
controversial national figure, was arrested Monday as investigators raided his
offices and seized about $1 million in cash and more than 66 pounds of gold.
Until
recently, the mining baron, Janardhana Reddy, was a kingmaker in the southern
state of Karnataka, where his family and allies once dominated important
ministries. From his base in the Bellary district, home to some of India’s
richest reserves of iron ore, Mr. Reddy controlled a mining empire in Karnataka
and the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh and made untold millions of dollars
exporting ore to China and elsewhere.
Mr.
Reddy was charged with illegal mining in Andhra Pradesh, after a Monday morning
raid at his headquarters in Bellary. According to India’s Central Bureau of
Investigation, “several incriminating documents” were confiscated, as well as
the cash and gold, itself worth more than $1 million. He was also charged with
fraud and criminal conspiracy.
“It was
a mafia-like system,” said N. Santosh Hegde, a former justice on India’s
Supreme Court who spent more than two years investigating illegal mining in
Karnataka as an independent state-level ombudsman. “That district had become
the Republic of Bellary. It is not part of India.”
Mr.
Reddy’s arrest comes as public disgust over official corruption has boiled over
in India. Hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets last
month to support ahunger
strike by the
anticorruption campaigner Anna Hazare, a pressure campaign that forced Indian leaders to
capitulate to many of Mr.
Hazare’s demands over the shape of a proposed independent anticorruption
agency.
Mr.
Reddy and his brothers were once political organizers who traveled on scooters
to work on behalf of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. Their political work
and the money they raised for campaigns helped the party win control of the
state government, while entrenching the family as the political kingpins of
Bellary. Rivals complained that Mr. Reddy used his political power for his own
competitive advantage in dominating the mining and transport of iron ore.
Mr.
Hegde, who recently stepped down from his ombudsman role in Karnataka, released a scathing report in July that concluded that illegal mining had cost
the state treasury more than $3.5 billion in tax revenues. In his report, Mr.
Hegde said the Reddy brothers had created a system to avoid paying royalties to
the government, while also taking a cut from any ore shipped, illegally or
legally, out of Karnataka.
Mr.
Reddy has consistently denied any
wrongdoing. But his power was so vast that his political allies once
nearly brought down the state government — run by his own party — to protest a
plan to increase taxes on ore shipments. Eventually, though, Mr. Reddy became
an embarrassment for national B.J.P. leaders. And in Karnataka, the mining
scandals forced the resignation of the former B.J.P. chief minister, B. S.
Yeddyurappa.
Even
today, Mr. Reddy’s political influence is potent inside Karnataka. The state
authorities have yet to take any legal action against any of the people named
in Mr. Hegde’s report.
[Pakistan’s top spy agency, known as the ISI, has long worked closely with the CIA on counterterror operations and hunts for senior al-Qaeda figures, many of whom are believed to be based in the Pakistani mountains bordering Afghanistan. But relations between the agencies have frayed in recent years over disagreements on CIA drone strikes, which Pakistani officials say have become too frequent and unilateral, and over U.S. beliefs that Pakistani spies provide support to some Islamist militants they deem strategically useful allies.]
[
By Karin
Brulliard
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —
The Pakistani military said Monday that its top spy agency had worked with the
CIA to arrest three senior al-Qaeda figures near the southwestern city of
Quetta, including one militant leader who was directed by Osama bin Laden to
strike economically significant targets in the West.
It was unclear how high
that militant, whom the army identified as Younis al-Mauritani, ranked in the
al-Qaeda hierarchy, or when the arrests took place. But the unusual
announcement, backed up by the White House, appeared to signal renewed
cooperation between the top Pakistani and U.S. intelligence agencies, whose
long-fraught relations decayed to a near breaking point this year.
The Pakistani military
said al-Mauritani was plotting strikes on American dams and gas and oil
pipelines and planning bombings of U.S. ships and oil tankers using
explosives-rigged speed boats. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency
detained him along with two other senior leaders, Abdul Ghaffar al-Shami and
Messara al-Shami, in an operation planned and carried out with the help of
“technical assistance” from U.S. intelligence, the military said in a statement
said.
In Washington, Tommy
Vietor, a White House spokesman, said the action had “led to the capture of a
senior al-Qa’ida operative who was involved in planning attacks against the
interests of the United States and many other countries.”
Both the White House
and the Pakistani military portrayed the arrests as a significant blow to
al-Qaeda, an organization that American officials have said may be near
strategic defeat following the U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden
at his hideout in Pakistan in May.
The announcement of the
arrests came one week after U.S. and Pakistani officials said al-Qaeda’s
second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, had
been killed in a CIA drone strike
in the Waziristan area of Pakistan’s rugged tribal region. The officials
characterized his death as a major loss for al-Qaeda.
According to the Long War Journal, a U.S.-based Web
site that covers the war on terror, a detained German-Afghan al-Qaeda figure
falsely identified al-Mauritani last year as the organization’s No. 3
operative. Senior U.S. intelligence officials countered at the time that while
al-Mauritani was a senior member of al-Qaeda’s committee to plan attacks on the
West, he was not its leader, the
Web site reported.
Pakistan’s top spy
agency, known as the ISI, has long worked closely with the CIA on counterterror
operations and hunts for senior al-Qaeda figures, many of whom are believed to
be based in the Pakistani mountains bordering Afghanistan. But relations
between the agencies have frayed in recent years over disagreements on CIA
drone strikes, which Pakistani officials say have become too frequent and unilateral,
and over U.S. beliefs that Pakistani spies provide support to some Islamist
militants they deem strategically useful allies.
Cooperation took a nose
dive in January after a CIA security contractor, Raymond Davis, fatally
shot two Pakistanis he sad
were trying to rob him in the eastern city of Lahore. Relations deteriorated
further after the bin Laden raid, which the United States carried out without
alerting Pakistani officials, in part out of fear that they would scuttle
the plan. Pakistani officials said joint operations had been cut off.
The Pakistani statement
Monday, however, praised the countries’ intelligence relationship as “strong”
and its cooperation as “intimate.”
“Both Pakistan and the
United States Intelligence agencies continue to work closely together to
enhance security of their respective nations,” the statement said.
