On one side is Bihar, on the other Nepal's Terai region. The 1751-km-long border is largely unmarked, unguarded, porous, and smuggling is as easy as cycling across the border with illegal goods.
The desperately poor people of the border smuggled essential commodities for years but increasingly a new and dangerous kind of contraband is making its way across from Nepal to India: fake Indian currency.
Birganj, the biggest town in Nepal's Terai region, has become a transit point for almost all the fake currency entering India. The smuggling is so widespread that Birganj’s Superintendent of Police Yogeshwar Rom Khami can produce produces hundreds of fake notes on asking.
“We have confiscated more than Rs 400,000 in fake notes. People from both sides (of the border) are involved in making these notes,” says Khami. And behind the fake currency racked is India’s traditional enemy Pakistan.
ISI imprint
Pakistani intelligence agents are using the porous border to push hundreds of crores of counterfeit Indian currency from Nepal to India. Their objective is to fund terror and sabotage the Indian economy.
The Raxaul-Birganj border crossing is where over 80 per cent of India's legitimate trade with Nepal is conducted. The border market is busy with national boundaries hold little meaning. It is also a very corrupt place.
On the Indian side agents for the police collect bribes from almost every traveller. Raxaul is one of the most corrupt customs posts on the Indian border and a place were several hundred crores of fake currency pass into the country.
On the Nepal side of the border the corruption is even more brazen. Nobody stopped the CNN-IBN team from filming border officials extorting money from people entering Nepal. No questions are asked, no fingers pointed.
A man carrying hundreds of fake Indian notes in a bag cycled past Nepalese customs and within minutes he was in India. Hundreds of couriers surreptitiously bring bundles of fake currency into India every day, neatly packed and hidden in small consignments of smuggled goods or personal belongings.
Fake currency dealers and couriers in Nepal told CNN-IBN that Pakistan’s spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is pushing crores of fake currency every month into India from Nepal. They also said that by 2010 nearly Rs 10,000 crore of fake currency would be in circulation in India.
A fake currency dealer who works for ISI showed CNN-IBN wads of counterfeit Indian money and alleged the Pakistan Embassy in Kathmandu is the nerve centre for fake currency operations.
The ISI agent told us that Khalid Mehmood, a senior ISI officer working in the Embassy's Education Department, runs the network with the help of another ISI officer called Jamil Alam.
With Nepal still dealing with its transition from monarchy to democracy, the ISI has lost no time in setting up a country-wide network, aided by gangster Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company.
Superintendent of Police Khami hinted at ISI’s involvement but refused to blame it outright. “Certainly there are some nations and agencies behind this operation. A common person can’t identify which is fake money and which is real. I can't say anything sitting on this chair,” said Khami.
Nepalese law enforcement sources gave CNN-IBN photographs and information about some of the ISI's key operatives in Nepal. Sheikh Jikar Ullah is a known criminal and an agent of India’s most wanted gangster Dawood Ibrahim.
Lal Mohammad, another Dawood aide Kathmandu, is used by the ISI to ferry fake currency from Bangladesh and Thailand to Nepal on international flights.
Intelligence sources say Lal Mohammad has a direct link to Mufti Abdul Hannan, the chief of the terror outfit, Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islam.
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