Dawood Ibrahim

Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar (/ɪbrəˈhiːm/ (); born 26 December 1955) is a Mumbai underworld figure, criminal mobster and drug dealer most wanted by India with a reward of $25 million over his head, and has been wanted since 1994. He is originally from Dongri in Mumbai, India.

He is currently believed to be residing in Pakistan, according to the Indian government, and heads the Indian organised crime syndicate D-Company which he founded in Mumbai in the 1970s. Dawood is wanted on the charges of murder, extortion, targeted killing, drug trafficking, terrorism and various other cases. He was designated as a global terrorist in 2003 by India and the United States with a reward of US$25 million for his capture for his believed role in the 1993 Bombay bombings. In 2011, he was named number three on "The World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives" by the FBI and Forbes.

Dawood Ibrahim was born on 26 December 1955 in a Konkani Muslim family in Ratnagiri district inMaharashtra, India.His father, Ibrahim Kaskar, worked as a head constable with the Mumbai Police and his mother, Amina, was a homemaker. He lived in the Temkar Mohalla area of Dongri,attended Ahmed Sailor High School from which he dropped out. He grew up in the Dongri locality of Mumbai, which was when he came in contact with the gang of mobster Haji Mastan, after the latter attacked two of Ibrahim's men.

Ibrahim 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. Many of the organisation's operations are in India.

The United States Department of the Treasury designated Ibrahim as a terrorist as part of its international sanctions program, effectively forbidding US financial entities from working with him and seizing assets believed to be under his control. The Department of 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 terrorist organization al-Qaeda. The fact sheet also said 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 traveled to Afghanistan under the Taliban's protection. The syndicate has consistently aimed to destabilise the Indian government through riots, terrorism and civil disobedience.

The US stated that it will request the United Nations to list Ibrahim "in pursuance of relevant Security Council resolutions". Such a UN listing will require that all UN member states freeze Ibrahim's assets and impose a travel ban. Juan Zarate, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, said that they are committed to identifying and attacking financial ties between terrorism and the underworld. Ibrahim is also suspected to have connections with terrorist organisations, and in 2002 was linked to the financing of increasing attacks in Gujarat by Lashkar-e-Toiba. In 2006, the government of India handed over to Pakistan, a list of 38 most wanted criminals including Ibrahim.

On 21 November 2006, it was reported that ten members of Ibrahim's gang were arrested by the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police. They were extradited from the United Arab Emirates, from where they had been deported.

India Today reported that Ibrahim provided the logistics for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

News media outlets reported the murder of Shiraz Asghar Ali as a sign of a dramatic shift of power between the crime lords.

The Nepal government has directed freezing of assets of 224 individuals and 64 groups with Ibrahim if they are present in Nepal under Nepal's Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Act.

In 2013, former Indian cricketer Dilip Vengsarkar alleged that in 1986, Dawood had entered the Indian team dressing room in Sharjah and offered each Indian player a car if they beat Pakistan in the Sharjah Cup final.

Dawood is widely believed to have masterminded the March 1993 bombings in Bombay. In 2003, the Indian and United States governments declared Ibrahim a "Global Terrorist." The Indian Deputy Prime Minister, Lal Krishna Advani described it as a major development. Ibrahim is currently on India's "Most Wanted List".

In a public discourse in June 2017, justice 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.

According to International claims, Ibrahim is believed to be living in Pakistan and then in the United Arab Emirates. According to Indian claims he has shifted to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Indian sources add that "Inter-Services Intelligence appeared extremely wary of the new Indo-US cooperation to fight terrorism. The Inter-Services Intelligence and Dawood appear under a lot of pressure" On 5 May 2015 MP Haribhai Chaudhary informed the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India's Parliament) that the whereabouts of Ibrahim were unknown. However, on 11 May, Rajnath Singh, the then Home Minister of India, told the parliament that Ibrahim was in Pakistan and he will bring him back to India.

According to claims of Indian news media Times Now on 22 August 2015, Dawood was in Karachi, Pakistan. According to said media corporation, they had conversation with a woman in Karachi on August 22, 2015. Transcripts of conversations which were published on the news agency's website, in one conversation she said that she is Dawood's wife and "he is sleeping", while in the second conversation she said that there was no one by that name known to her.

According to a dossier prepared by India in August 2015, to be handed over to Pakistan, Ibrahim has nine residences in Pakistan and has three Pakistani passports which he frequently uses to travel.

He has been on The World's 10 Most Wanted list since 2010, and third in the list, and is designated a "global terrorist". 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. His location has been frequently traced to Karachi, Pakistan, a claim which the Pakistani authorities have frequently denied. The claims were further established in August 2015, when a phone call made to his home by an Indian television channel, Times Now, was answered by his wife, who confirmed his presence at their home in Karachi. The Indian intelligence agencies immediately prepared a dossier of Ibrahim which included evidence of his location in Karachi, among other evidence. It was to be presented at the National Security Agency-level talks between the two countries in the same month, which was however, called off due to political reasons.

In an interview with India Today, Chhota Rajan, a former aide of Ibrahim, who he later fell out with in 1992, said that, "He [Ibrahim] does travel out of Pakistan once in a while but Karachi is his base."

Chhota Rajan is believed to have assisted intelligence agencies in getting a low down on the activities of the D-Company and its members by using his intimate knowledge of the criminal enterprise and its operations from his experience. To reinforce his reputation as a patriotic gangster don, Chhota Rajan threatened to brutally murder those accused of engineering the 1993 Mumbai bombings. Saleem ‘Kurla’ in April 1998 followed by Mohammad Jindran in June 1998 and Majeed Khan on 1 March 1999 were shot dead.

The Shiv Sena, which ruled Maharashtra in a coalition with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from 1994 to 1999, is speculated to have sympathized with Chhota Rajan. It is reported that selective police action against the Ibrahim crime syndicate during the Shiv Sena administration and its subsequent decline through encounter killings helped strengthen Chhota Rajan's position in the underworld. This is similar to how Dawood Ibrahim himself had benefitted from the 1980s police campaign against the Pathans. The Shiv Sena laid bare its affection for Chhota Rajan in an editorial in the Saamna newspaper, its mouthpiece, edited by Bal Thackeray. The editorial heaved a sigh of relief, attributing Chhota Rajan's survival to "good fortune" resulting from divine grace. ThePakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was believed to be behind the attempted assassination of Chhota 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 Dawood 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 half prior.

In 2006, Ibrahim's daughter, Mahrukh Ibrahim, married Junaid Miandad, the son of Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad. In 2011, his daughter Mehreen, 24, married Ayub, a Pakistani-American. His son Moin married Saniya, daughter of a London-based businessman on 25 September 2011. Several of his family members, including his brother, Iqbal Kaskar, live in Mumbai.

Dawood Ibrahim and his syndicate D-Company have been linked to the financing of the Bollywood film industry. A number of Bollywood studios and films were financed by D-Company in the 1980s and 1990s. Ibrahim was linked to a number of celebrities during that time, including the beauty pageant contestant Anita Ayub and the Bollywood actress Mandakini. D-Company is also known for extortion and threats targeted towards Bollywood producers and celebrities, and was involved in the murders of Bollywood producers Javed Siddique and Gulshan Kumar.

The 2002 film Company is based loosely on D-Company's activities, and its sequel (prequel to events in the movie), the 2005 film D, as well as Shootout at Lokhandwala (2007) and the 2010 film Once Upon a Time in Mumbai. The 2013 movie Shootout at Wadala is based on the rise of the D-Company. The film Haseena Parkar (2017) is a biographical crime film based on his sister, Haseena Parkar.