Five years before his appointment at Bromwell High, Iqbal had escaped from Parkhurst where he was serving time for an unspecified crime. He subsequently met Mr. Bibby in Angola where they operated a diamond smuggling business together and "dabbled" in human trafficking. After being forced to leave Africa in a U.N. helicopter gunship, Iqbal arrived in England with nothing but the shirt on his back, a faded five pound note in his pocket, and a Bedford van's exhaust chamber full of state-of-the-art hydroponic equipment and marijuana seeds with the potential street value, when cultivated, of £80,000 (equal to £81,000 today). With these simple tools, he ran a mini-cab company and built an empire that today covers many thousand square feet.
