In a Time list of the world's most notorious mob bosses, Ibrahim was ranked 9th.[9] 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.[10][11][12]
Early life
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born on 26 December 1955 to a Konkani Muslim family in Khed in Maharashtra, India.[13][14] His father, Ibrahim Kaskar, worked as a head constable with the Mumbai Police and his mother, Amina Bi, was a homemaker.[15] He lived in the Temkar Mohalla area of Dongri, Mumbai and attended Ahmed Sailor High School, from which he dropped out.
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.[16] 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 syndicateD-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.[17] 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.[18] 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.[19][20]
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.[21] This is similar to how Dawood Ibrahim himself had benefitted from the 1980s police campaign against the Pathan gang.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24] 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.[23]
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.[25][26]
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.[8][27]
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.[37][38]
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.[39][40][41][42] His current location has been frequently traced to Karachi, Pakistan, a claim which the Pakistani authorities have frequently denied.[43][44][45][46][47] 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."[48]
In 2006, the government of India handed over to Pakistan, a list of 38 most wanted criminals including Ibrahim.[34]
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.[49][50][51][52][53] 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.[54][55] According to a dossier on Ibrahim prepared by Indian intelligence agencies 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.[56][57][58][59]
On 22 August 2020, Pakistan amid looming Financial Action Task Force sanctions issued two notifications listing and sanctioning key terrorist figures including Dawood and 87 others.[62][6] In it, three addresses of Dawood Ibrahim were listed "White House, Near Saudi Mosque, Clifton" in Karachi, Pakistan; in addition to "House No. 37 – 30th Street – defence, Housing Authority, Karachi" and "Palatial bungalow in the hilly area of Noorabad in Karachi".[63] Pakistan denied it was admitting he was in Pakistan, stating the notifications only contained what was listed in the list of sanctioned individuals and the entities belonging to the United Nations.[6] He had been designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council with those addresses in 2003.[31]
Personal life and family
Ibrahim's wife is Mahjabeen Shaikh a.k.a. Zubeena Zareen.[56]
In 2006, Ibrahim's daughter, Mahrukh Ibrahim, married Junaid Miandad, the son of Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad.[64][65] In 2011, his daughter Mehreen, 24, married Ayub, a Pakistani-American.[66]
His only son Moin married Saniya, daughter of a London-based businessman on 25 September 2011.[67] Moin lives in Karachi, Pakistan where he teaches in a mosque, having memorized the Qur'an and become a maulana, while being critical of his father's criminal activities.[68]
Several of his family members, including his brother, Iqbal, live in Mumbai, and he is the owner of several properties in the city.[69] In May 2015, Dawood Ibrahim's estimated net worth was US$6.7 billion.[70]
In 2013, former Indian cricketer Dilip Vengsarkar claimed that in 1986, Dawood Ibrahim entered the Indian team's dressing room in Sharjah and offered each Indian player a car if they defeated Pakistan in the final of the Sharjah Cup.[71]
In popular culture
Bollywood
Ibrahim and his criminal 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 Ayoob 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.[72]
The 2018 video game Hitman 2 features a Mumbai crime lord "Dawood Rangan" who is active in the Indian film industry, presumably as a reference to Ibrahim himself.
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