Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was born on 26 December 1955 in Khed, Konkan, Maharashtra. He was brought up in Dongri, Mumbai. He is an Indian mafia gangster, drug kingpin, gold smuggler and a most wanted terrorist from Dongri, Mumbai. He reportedly heads the Indian organised crime syndicate D-Company, which he founded in Mumbai in the 1970s. His gang reached the pinaccle after much tussle and struggle and finally it was in the position to call the shots in and around Mumbai. His gang D-Company is also reported to be involved in extortions and kidnapping for ransoms. Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar is also presumed to have financed a few property developers and film producers.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar is wanted by the Indian police and intelligence agencies on the charges including murder, extortion, targeted killing, drug trafficking, and terrorism.
He was designated and notified as a global terrorist by India and the United States in 2003, with a reward of US$25 million on his head for his suspected role in the 1993 Bombay Bomb Blasts Case. In 2011, he was named number three on "The World's 10 Most Wanted Fugitives" by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) and Forbes magazine. Recently, the Pakistani government listed Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar and 87 others in its sanction list in order to avoid FATF sanctions under the duress from USA and UNO.
He has been reported to live in Karachi, Pakistan by the Indian Intelligence Agencies, though the government of Pakistan vehemently denies it. In 2020, the Indian government confiscated and subsequently sold off Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar's six properties in his ancestral village Khed in Ratnagiri district in coastal region of Konkan in Maharashtra through 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.
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, a housewife. He lived in the Majgaon Dock area of Dongri and attended Ahmed Sailor High School, from which he dropped out later. His innings with crimes started rather early in life. He began to experiment with petty crimes in his early lifetime.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar started committing fraud, theft and robbery while still in his teens. Eventually, he joined the gang of a local gangster and don Baashu Dada, who was part of the local organised crime syndicate. In the late 1970s, he later split from the gang because of some dispute, creating his own gang with his elder brother Shabir Ibrahim Kaskar who died an early death. After Shabir Kaskar was killed by the rival Pathan gang, he became the sole boss of his gang, known as the D-Company. He was then chiefly involved in gold smuggling, real estate, extortion and drug trafficking. His connection at the Mumbai Port, Mazgaon Dock and in the Mumbai police department helped him grow faster in the business. He eliminated his bête noire Alam Zaib and others but also lost his brother in the gang war aimed at capturing the dominion position in the Mumbai underworld.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar fled from India to Dubai in 1986 after being wanted by the Mumbai Police for the murder of Samad Khan from rival Pathan Gang. In the following years he further expanded his gang with the help of his second-in-command Chhota Rajan and in his most trusted comfidante Chota Shakeel, with his gang having over 5000 members and bringing in tens of crores of rupees in revenue annually by the early 1990s. One another prominent member of his is Feroz Konkani who was very instrumental in executing bomb blasts in Mumbai together with Tiger Memon a trusted lieutenant of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.
During his criminal career he had to tackle the biggies of the underworld at the time like, Kareem Lala, Haji Mastan Mirza and Arun Gawali. He had a tough and bitter tussle with Manya Surve who was later eliminated by the Bombay Police in first of its kind encounter under the charge of Aftab Ahmed Khan.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar played a very major and crucial role in organising and executing bomb blasts in the aftermath of riots occured because of demolition of Babri Mosque. His knowledge with Konkan region and its coastline which was used by his network for years for carrying out smuggling activities helped in transportation of explosives and ammunitions swiftly.
He was named by the Indian government as one of the masterminds in the 1993 Mumbai Attacks. Following the attacks, he fled Dubai for Karachi, where he is said to live to this day. India is signatory to the deportation treaty with UAE and it was feared he may be handed over to the Indian authorities by the UAE authorities. While India doesn't have a similar repatriation treaty with Pakistan.
The United States Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar as a terrorist on the Specially Designated Nationals List and the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act 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 Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar 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 Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar'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, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar traveled to Afghanistan under the Taliban's protection. The syndicate has consistently aimed to destabilise India through riots, terrorism, civil disobedience and pumping fake Indian currency notes into the country. India Today reported that Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar provided the logistics for the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Presently, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar's criminal activities are terror funding, drug trafficking, gunrunning, extortion and money laundering. He has also heavily invested in real estate in 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 Lashkar-e-Taiba. In 2006, the government of India handed over to Pakistan, a list of 38 most wanted criminals including Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar. His crime syndicate spreads across Asia, Europe and Africa, with over 40% of its earnings coming from India.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar 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. Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar is currently on India's "Most Wanted List". And in his absence his elder sister Haseena Parker is looking after the activities of his network in India.
In a public discourse in June 2017, Ram Jethmalani confirmed that after the Bombay blasts, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar 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 Ibrahim Kaskar's return was due to their fears that he would expose their secrets.
Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar is previously assumed to be living in Pakistan and then in the United Arab Emirates. India says he has shifted to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Indian sources add that "Inter-Services Intelligence appeared extremely wary of the new US-Indo cooperation to fight terrorism." On 5 May 2015 MP Haribhai Chaudhary informed the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India's Parliament that the whereabouts of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar were unknown. However, on 11 May, Rajnath Singh, the then Home Minister of India, told the parliament that Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was in Pakistan and he will bring him back to India.
According to the claims of Indian news media Times Now on 22 August 2015, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was in Karachi, Pakistan. According to said media corporation, they had conversation with a woman in Karachi on 22 August 2015. Transcripts of conversations which were published on the news agency's website, in one of the conversations 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, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar has nine residences in Pakistan and has three Pakistani passports which he frequently uses to travel.
On 22 August 2020, Pakistan issued two notifications sanctioning key terrorist figures. In it, three addresses of Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar were listed "White House, Near Saudi Mosque, Clifton" in Karachi, Pakistan; in addition to "House Nu 37 – 30th Street – defence, Housing Authority, Karachi" and "Palatial bungalow in the hilly area of Noorabad in Karachi". 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. He had been designated by the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee with those addresses in 2003.
He was third on Forbes's The World's 10 Most Wanted list from 2010 until it stopped publishing the list in 2011, 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 and vehemently 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 Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar 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 [Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar] 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 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 Bombay bombings. Saleem ‘Kurla’ in April 1998 followed by Mohammad Jindran in June 1998 and Majeed Khan on 1 March 1999 were shot dead.
It is reported that selective police action against the dawood Ibrahim Kaskar 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 Kaskar 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. The Pakistani 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 Kaskar 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.
Comments
Post a Comment