According to court documents, the Pakistani businessman Muhammad Asif Hafeez was kidnapped from Kenya in defiance of local court orders, along with his real brothers Baktash Akasha Abdalla and Ibrahim Akasha Abdalla, Vicky Goswami, the husband of Bollywood actress Mamta Kalkarni, and Ghulam Hussein. One of the four men was then turned into a witness against the Pakistani national.
Asif Hafeez’s case is not typical and has all the elements of a Hollywood thriller: drama, action, intrigue, organised crime, drug trafficking, entrapments, Bollywood, American secret agents, forced confessions, a mystery murder, Greek tragedy, and the highest level of betrayals.
At least four key figures connected to the 2014 Kenya drugs operation, which also involved India, Bollywood, and Pakistan, have come forward to claim that Asif Hafeez was not involved in sending drugs shipment to Greece and the US and that US agents had set out to target him for several years through every legal and illegal method, including indu. The Greece drugs conspiracy of 2004 involved 650 tonnes of hashish smuggling from Pakistan.
The case is further unbelievable because Asif Hafeez actually provided intelligence to espionage organisations in the USA, UAE, UK, and Pakistan at one point. Britain’s secret services even thanked him in a letter of commendation for his assistance in stopping a shipment of tonnes of drugs from entering the UK.
The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) asserts that between 2014 and 2017, it looked into the possibility of bringing drugs from Kenya into the country. Baktash Akasha Abdalla, Ibrahim Akasha Abdalla, Vijaygiri Anandgiri Goswami (also known as Vicky Goswami), and Ghulam Hussein were approached by US sources masquerading as Colombian drug dealers in order to purchase heroin for importation and supply into the US. According to the US indictment, Baktash Akasha agreed that he could obtain heroin for supply to the US and informed the sources that his supplier was from Pakistan and went by several aliases, one of which was the Sultan, who later turned out to be Asif Hafeez. Baktash Akasha’s supplier was Pakistani and used several aliases, including the Sultan.
The supply of 98 kg of heroin to US sources in October 2014 is claimed to have been coordinated by those four guys and the Sultan (Asif Hafeez). According to the US Government, the “Sultan” was later identified as Muhammad Asif Hafeez during investigations, particularly after devices belonging to the Akasha brothers, Goswami, and several other confidential sources were searched. Messages were allegedly connected to Asif Hafeez’s phone numbers when these devices were searched.
Kenya’s once-powerful Akasha brothers, Vijay Goswami and Ghulam Hussein were first arrested by the Kenya Anti-Narcotics Unit on 9 November 2014 in Mombasa on a request from the US govt alleging conspiracy to import drugs into the US but they were soon released on bail.
For over three years, the four men put up a strong defence against the US extradition bid and it didn’t look like the local courts would extradite them to the US anytime soon. Around 23rd January 2017, all four were arrested by the Kenyan authorities in a sudden operation and within a week – without authorisation of extradition from any local court and without the due process being followed – the four accused were flown out of Kenya and produced before New York’s Southern District Court where charges were read out against them and a new superseding charge was added which alleged that in Kenya the four bribed the local officials to prevent their extradition. Their lawyers and families have alleged that the US kidnapped and extraordinarily rendered them with help from the Kenyan government.
