Dawood Ibrahim

Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar ( , Hindi pronunciation: [d̪aːˈuːd̪ ɪbɾaːˈɦiːm kaːskəɾ]; born 26 December 1955) is an Indian mob boss, drug lord and narcoterrorist. He heads the organised crime syndicate D-Company, which he founded in Mumbai in the 1970s. Ibrahim is wanted on multiple charges of murder, extortion, targeted killing, drug trafficking and terrorism among others.

He has been reported to live in Karachi, Pakistan, though the government of Pakistan denies it.

He was designated a global terrorist by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council and by the United States in 2003 for masterminding the 1993 Bombay bombings. The United States has a bounty of US$25 million on his head.

In a Time list of the world's most notorious mob bosses, Ibrahim was ranked 9th. Ibrahim was third on Forbes' "The World's 10 Most Wanted" list from 2010 until it stopped publishing the list in 2011. In 2011, he was named number two on "The World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives" by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Early life

Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born on 26 December 1955 to a Konkani Muslim family in Khed in Maharashtra, India. His father, Ibrahim Kaskar, worked as a head constable with the Mumbai Police and his mother, Amina Bi, was a homemaker. He lived in the Temkar Mohalla area of Dongri, Mumbai and attended Ahmed Sailor High School, from which he dropped out.

Crime and terrorism

Dawood started committing fraud, theft and robbery while still in his teens. In Dongri, he first came into contact with the gangster Haji Mastan, after he attacked two of Ibrahim's men. Eventually, he joined the gang of local gangster and don Baashu Dada, part of the local organised crime syndicate. In the late 1970s, he later split from the gang, creating his own gang with his elder brother Shabir Ibrahim Kaskar. After Shabir was killed by the rival Pathan gang of Karim Lala, he became the sole boss of his gang and later criminal syndicate D-Company. He was then chiefly involved in gold smuggling, real estate, extortion and drug trafficking. He fled from India to Dubai in 1986 after being wanted by the Mumbai Police for the murder of Samad Khan. In the following years, he further expanded his gang with the help of his second-in-command Chhota Rajan, with his gang having over 5000 members and bringing in hundreds of millions of rupees in revenue annually by the early 1990s.

Ibrahim had a long-standing feud with notorious Indian criminal Manya Surve.

Dawood is widely believed to have masterminded the March 1993 bombings in Bombay. In a public discourse in June 2017, Ram Jethmalani confirmed that after the Bombay blasts, Dawood Ibrahim had called him from London, saying that he was prepared to come to India and stand trial, on the condition that he should not be subjected to any third degree treatment from the police. Jethmalani had conveyed this to Sharad Pawar, but the politicians in power did not agree to this proposal. As per Jethmalani, their refusal to allow Dawood's return was due to their fears that he would expose their secrets.

Following the attacks, he fled Dubai for Karachi, Pakistan where he is said to live to this day.

It is reported that selective police action against the D-Company during the Shiv Sena administration and its subsequent decline through encounter killings helped strengthen former Ibrahim aide Chhota Rajan's position in the underworld. This is similar to how Dawood Ibrahim himself had benefitted from the 1980s police campaign against the Pathan gang. The Shiv Sena laid bare its affection for Rajan in an editorial in the Saamana newspaper, its mouthpiece, edited by Bal Thackeray. The editorial heaved a sigh of relief, attributing Rajan's survival to "good fortune" resulting from divine grace. To reinforce his reputation as a 'patriotic don', Rajan threatened to brutally murder those accused of engineering the 1993 Bombay bombings. Saleem "Kurla" in April 1998 followed by Mohammad Jindran in June 1998 and Majeed Khan on 1 March 1999 were shot dead. Rajan is believed to have assisted Indian intelligence agencies in understanding the activities of the D-Company and its members by using his intimate knowledge of the criminal organisation and its operations from his experience. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was subsequently believed to be behind an attempted assassination of Rajan.

In February 2010, alleged Chhota Rajan associates gunned down Nepali media baron Jamim Shah point blank in broad daylight as he was driving to his residence on a public road. Shah ostensibly had links with Ibrahim and was the mastermind of a racket producing counterfeit Indian currency within Nepal. His anti-Indian criminal activities had rankled the Indian government for more than a decade and a half prior.

The United States Department of the Treasury keeps a fact sheet on Ibrahim which contains reports of his syndicate having smuggling routes from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa shared with and used by the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. The fact sheet also says that Ibrahim's syndicate is involved in large-scale shipment of narcotics in the United Kingdom and Western Europe. He is also believed to have had contacts with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In the late 1990s, Ibrahim travelled to Afghanistan under the Taliban's protection. The syndicate has consistently aimed to destabilise India through riots, terrorism, civil unrest and pumping fake Indian currency notes into the country.

Presently, Ibrahim's criminal activities are terror funding, drug trafficking, gunrunning, extortion and money laundering. He has also heavily invested in the real estate of Karachi, Dubai and India. He is believed to control much of the hawala system, which is the very commonly used unofficial system for transferring money and remittances outside the view of official agents. He was linked to the financing of increasing attacks in Gujarat by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). India Today reported that Ibrahim provided the logistics for the 2008 Mumbai attacks perpetrated by the LeT.

His D-Company criminal syndicate spreads across Asia, Europe and Africa, with over 40% of its earnings coming from India.

Sanctions and location

In 2003, he was designated a global terrorist by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council and by the United States for masterminding the 1993 Bombay bombings. The United States has a reward of US$25 million on his head. Then Indian Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani described it as a major development. Ibrahim is on the NIA Most Wanted list in India. He has also been wanted by Interpol since 1993 for organised crime and forgery.

In the United States, the United States Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control designates Ibrahim as a terrorist on the Specially Designated Nationals List and under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act as part of its international sanctions programme, effectively forbidding US financial entities from working with him and seizing assets believed to be under his control. In 2006, the U.S. government announced that it planned to file a petition with the United Nations requesting that all UN member states freeze assets of Ibrahim and impose a travel ban on him in order to identify and disrupt the financial links between terrorism and organised crime.

On 21 November 2006, it was ten members of Dawood Ibrahim's D-Company were arrested by the Mumbai Crime Branch after being extradited from the United Arab Emirates. In 2013, the Nepalese government froze the assets of 224 individuals and 64 entities linked to Dawood Ibrahim as part of an anti-money laundering campaign.

In 2020, the Indian government sold off Dawood's six properties in his ancestral village in Ratnagiri district in coastal Konkan in Maharashtra. The government organized the e-auction of his properties under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act (SAFEMA), 1976. In November 2017, Dawood's three properties, including the famous Rounaq Afroz Restaurant, also known as Delhi Zaika, were auctioned off by the government.

Many attempts have been made to locate Ibrahim by the Indian intelligence agencies, Research and Analysis Wing and Intelligence Bureau (IB), ever since he went into hiding after the 1993 Bombay bombings. Ibrahim has previously been reported to be in Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates at various times. His current location has been frequently traced to Karachi, Pakistan, a claim which the Pakistani authorities have frequently denied. In an interview with India Today, Chhota Rajan, a former aide of Ibrahim, with whom he later fell out in 1992, said, "He [Ibrahim] does travel out of Pakistan once in a while but Karachi is his base."

In 2006, the government of India handed over to Pakistan, a list of 38 most wanted criminals including Ibrahim.