Dawood Ibrahim: India’s Elusive Most Wanted Man
Dawood Ibrahim: India’s Elusive Most Wanted Man
Figured at number three in Forbes’s most wanted fugitive list in 2010—and ranked at number 50 in Forbes’ list of “The World’s Most Powerful People” in 2009—Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar remains the most notorious underworld leader who has spread a robust crime network across the Middle East and South Asia, one which possesses collusive ties with transnational terror groups like al-Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba (Forbes, November 11, 2009; Times of India, May 17, 2010).
Ibrahim, who has an international arrest warrant issued against him by Interpol at the behest of the Indian government, was declared a global terrorist by the Bush administration under Executive Order 13224 in October 2003. In June 2006, he, along with his underworld consortium called D-Company, was identified as an international drug trafficker under the United States Kingpin Act.
Since November 2003, Ibrahim has been listed by the UN Security Council’s al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee as an individual associated with al-Qaeda and is subjected to an asset freeze, travel ban and arms embargo adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations. This entry was updated for the fourth time in March 2010.
Infamous throughout the subcontinent for his pan-South Asian criminal network, Ibrahim and his syndicate sparked an atmosphere of terror since the deadly 1993 Mumbai serial blasts which he masterminded from his rear bases in Karachi and Dubai, where he is believed to have provided both material and financial support.
By perpetrating Mumbai attacks, a succession of 13 bombings that rocked India’s commercial capital on March 12, 1993 including the Indian Stock Exchange, and subsequent subversive actions in India, Ibrahim became an essential collaborator of Pakistan’s intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations seeking to inflict maximum harm on Delhi and operating out of Pakistan’s territory. Islamabad has been denying ever since the presence of Dawood Ibrahim, Tiger Memon and Chhota Shakeel, who are listed in the 42 wanted fugitives for whom India is looking. Indian intelligence agencies believe that Ibrahim is operating from the UAE and Pakistan. Even though the Pakistan government has been tight-lipped and constantly in denial about his whereabouts, Dawood’s daughter Mahrukh Ibrahim recently revealed on her Facebook page that her father is living comfortably in the Clifton section of Karachi with several other members of the Ibrahim family (Hindustan Times, June 12, 2010).
Dawood Ibrahim, the son of a police official, was born in the Konkan coast port town of Ratanagiri in Maharashtra State on India’s southwest coast in 1955 and was raised in a slum of Mumbai (then still known as Bombay). He began his foray into criminality in the early 1970s working with mafia leaders of Mumbai like Haji Mastan and Alamezeb Pathan, who were known for their multi-layered rackets consisting of drugs and gold bullion smuggling. He laid the foundation for his own crime network in 1981 and consolidated his position in the Mumbai underworld along with Chhota Shakeel and Rajendra Nikhalje (a.k.a. Chhota Rajan). He is believed to have fled India sometime in either 1984 or 1986 and relocated himself—shuttling between a pre-boom Dubai and living openly in Pakistan’s sweltering former capital of Karachi under the tutelage of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), where he has been controlling his multibillion transnational crime network ever since. Ibrahim is thought to have as many as 11 passports in his name issued from India, Pakistan, UAE and Yemen. Documentary evidence suggests that he received his Pakistani passport No. G866537 in August 1991.
Dawood’s underlings were actively involved in all possible types of criminality in India in the 1980s through the mid-1990s including extortion, counterfeiting, kidnapping for ransom, smuggling, drug trafficking and contract killing. His links with the Indian film industry and lavish lifestyle have been well-documented in the Indian media over the decades and his story is now a fixture of Bollywood folklore. Despite his widespread and well-known criminal activities, Dawood has continually evaded capture over the decades, a fact that has only added to his dark mystique.
What was believed to be a revenge act in retaliation for the 1992 demolition of the Mughal-era Babri mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya by Hindu zealots, and the ensuing communal riots in Mumbai, the 1993 Mumbai bombings brought a radicalized Dawood into a new world of anti-Indian terrorism. Those who destroyed the fifteenth century mosque believe it to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama and the wounds inflicted on Indian society stemming from the events of 1992-93 have not healed to this day. With growing cooperation between Pakistan’s ISI and terror groups like LeT and Jaish-e-Muhammed, Dawood became a major interlocutor between both terror outfits and criminal networks throughout the South Asian region.
Since then Dawood has dabbled in both funding and orchestrating terrorism and has directed his resources to attack the Indian state from abroad. He, along with his trusted lieutenant Tiger Memon, planned to establish an arms factory in India to avenge the Babri mosque demolition and to defend the underserved Muslim minority in India, which they viewed as perpetually under threat from the country’s comparatively empowered Hindu majority (Indian Express, June 15, 2010).
Most recently, India’s intelligence agency, the Intelligence Bureau (IB), reportedly intercepted and foiled a joint LeT and D-Company plot to assassinate Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks who remains in Indian custody. Reports suggested that Dawood’s gang had agreed to send a hit man to attempt to carry out a Kasab killing in Mumbai in order to destroy the human evidence of the plot. It should be noted here that Ibrahim reportedly arranged some of the most crucial logistics, including the boat ride from Karachi to the coast of nearby Gujarat State to Mumbai’s north, whereby they were transferred to another vessel onward to their target city, Mumbai (Rediff.com, May 2003).
After more than a year of inaction, the LeT and the ISI rejuvenated their tactics by using Ibrahim’s existing smuggling routes in India and neighboring countries (Rediff.com, February 24, 2010). India’s IB believes that the LeT roped Ibrahim’s Mumbai contact, identified simply as Muhammad, and a Pakistani aide named Arif Qasmani, to handle safe passage of arms and ammunitions into India, as part of the so-called “Karachi conspiracy” that continually emanates from Ibrahim and the LeT’s safe haven on Pakistan’s coast on the Arabian sea.
Another agent of D-Company, Feroze Abdul Rashid Khan (a.k.a Hamza) who was apprehended in Mumbai in early February, reportedly confessed during his subsequent interrogation that Dawood Ibrahim has indeed been a major sponsor of the LeT (Times Now, February 24, 2010).
Dawood Ibrahim’s fixation with Mumbai surfaced again with a plot to carry out terror strikes at India’s Oil and Natural Gas Cooperation headquarters as well as the Thakkar Mall and Mangaldas market. The plot was hatched in Pakistan by an Ibrahim aide named Bashir Khan along with two Pakistani operatives, Abdul Latif and Riyaz Ali and was successfully interrupted by Indian authorities before it could be carried out (Hindustan Times, June 9, 2010).
Dawood and his enterprise are also involved in funding terrorism through the deft exploitation hawala (informal remittance) networks. In September 2009, an Indian Enforcement Directorate (ED) official arrested Naresh Jain, a notorious Dubai-based Indian global hawala operator closely associated with Dawood Ibrahim. Naresh Jain was accused by the United States of funding terrorist activities and running a hawala operation worth millions of dollars. Jain had been utilizing his network spanning Asia, Africa and Europe to facilitate financial transactions of Dawood’s narcotics trade. Jain, whose areas of operations are believed to be spread over Nigeria, Italy, Afghanistan, China and Pakistan among many other countries, was on the radar of the United States, the UK, India and Italy for a long time. International intelligence agencies have confirmed earlier that Jain was involved in laundering drug money for various terrorist outfits including al-Qaeda and the Taliban, at the behest of Dawood Ibrahim. Presently Naresh Jain has been booked under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities (CFEPS) Act (Hindustan Times, December 9, 2009; Daily News and Analysis, June 9, 2010).
Over the years, Ibrahim and D-Company have established operational bases in neighboring Bangladesh and Nepal and as far as Thailand and Kenya, mostly with operatives evading arrest in India itself. In Bangladesh, Dawood Ibrahim’s network operates with impunity, mostly with local Bengalis and recruits of Indian origin. The arrests of Abdur Rouf Merchant, who was convicted in the 1997 killing of a notable music producer in Mumbai, as well as Zahid Shaykh and a Bangladeshi named Kamal Mian have established D-Company’s now well-entrenched operations in the country (New Nation [Dhaka], May 31, 2009). The following week, another key aide of Dawood Ibrahim and purported Indian national carrying Bangladeshi citizenship, Arif Hossain, was arrested and he disclosed that the network in Bangladesh involved over 100 men, including Indian and Bangladeshis nationals (Times of India, June 7, 2009). According to Hossain, Chhota Shakeel, the right hand man of Dawood Ibrahim who operated out of Dubai and Karachi, use to finance the Bangladeshi network though extortion and counterfeiting (Indo Asian News Service, June 6, 2009). Equally alarming, the Pakistan-based LeT and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami Bangladesh (HuJI-B) have operational ties with Dawood Ibrahim’s underworld network in Bangladesh. The information about the ties surfaced with the arrest of an LeT operative named Mufti Obaidullah in July 2009 (The Daily Star [Dhaka], July 18, 2009).
Dawood Ibrahim and his colleagues have also established a thriving counterfeit industry in Nepal, reportedly with the help of the ISI, the former crown prince of Nepal and the son of a former Nepalese legislator (Times of India, August 31, 2009). In August 2009, Indian anti-terror police apprehended three Nepalese nationals identified as Rajesh Gupta, Ateeq Ahmad and Vikky Manihar. Vikky, the son of an ISI agent named Majid Manihar—who was a point man of the ISI ‘s extra-territorial network in Nepal—was arrested on August 30, 2009 in the border town of Rupaidhia in Uttar Pradesh State, along the Indian-Nepali frontier and found to be in possession of counterfeit Indian rupees. Vikki Manihar reportedly revealed that fake rupees were printed in Lahore and Karachi and sent on to Nepal via a cargo shipment system to ultimately be distributed in India (Rediff.com, December 31, 2009). Further Indian investigation proved D-Company’s involvement in the flourishing trans-South Asian bogus currency trade. Majid Manihar was later found murdered in a Nepali hotel (Hindustan Times, October 12, 2009).
Majid Manihar was assassinated by Dawood’s archrival, the Indo-Arab gangster Ali Budesh, who is based in the tiny gulf kingdom of Bahrain. The gang war spearheaded by Budhesh and his accomplice Babloo Srivastav was aimed at weakening competing D-Company operations in Nepal and India. Budesh, operating from his base in Manama, targeted and killed other key Dawood aides Jamim Shah and Parvez Tanda as far afield as Kathmandu. These leaders oversaw the underworld’s currency counterfeiting schemes in India (India Today, March 29, 2010).
D-Company’s footprint expanded westward to Africa soon after the Mumbai police intensified its search and sweep operation following the game changing 1993 bombings. Several members of the D-Company fled to Kenya in the east and Nigeria in the west. Reports suggested that these operatives were led by a fugitive LeT man called Syed Abdul Karim “Tunda” who supervised D-Company’s Africa operations. It is believed that Tunda, a senior LeT operative, helped Dawood Ibrahim to forge drugs trading ties with al-Qaeda’s operation in east Africa. Tunda was initially believed to have been arrested by Kenyan authorities in Mombasa in 2006 on charges of being involved in the Mumbai bombings (Press Trust of India, July 21, 2006) but the story was later reversed when Kenyan officials said the man turned out not to be Tunda after an interrogation (Press Trust of India, July 23, 2006).
Dawood Ibrahim, who has been described by many as the penultimate godfather of India’s underworld, remains elusive even after Interpol’s Red Corner Notice. His journey from a larger than life criminal to a more radical sponsor of terror signifies his motives: first and foremost the simple pursuit of money, which is governed by his finely tuned business acumen; the second aim of Ibrahim is securing a safe haven for himself and his empire in Pakistan. His daughter, Marukh Ibrahim, recently married the son of famed Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad in a lavish wedding ceremony in Dubai in July 2005. Ibrahim’s glaring absence at the gala event in the same city that was once his playground is evidence that his once liberal freedom of movement is now restricted (Forbes, November 11, 2009). Though as the Pakistani authorities continue to deny his presence on their territory, there is no reason to believe Mumbai’s premiere exiled don will be captured in the immediate future.
