Dawood Ibrahim

• 1. Introduction

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  Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar has a bounty of US$25 million on his head, offered by the United States. In August 2015, an Indian television channel, Times Now, phoned a home in Karachi. His wife answered and confirmed that he was there. The government of Pakistan denies that he lives in the country at all. Ibrahim is an Indian gangster who founded the organised crime syndicate D-Company in Mumbai in the 1970s. He is wanted on charges that include murder, extortion, targeted killing, drug trafficking and terrorism. How did the son of a Mumbai police officer become one of the most hunted fugitives in the world? What is he accused of doing from exile? And why do governments still disagree about where he is?

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• 2. Streets of Dongri

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

  The gangster Haji Mastan first crossed paths with Dawood in Dongri, while Dawood was still a teenager committing fraud, theft and robbery. Eventually he joined the gang of a local don named Baashu Dada, which belonged to a larger local organised crime syndicate.

  In the late 1970s Dawood split from that gang and formed his own with his elder brother, Shabir Ibrahim Kaskar. The rival Pathan gang of Karim Lala killed Shabir. Dawood became the sole boss, and the gang grew into the syndicate known as D-Company. Its business was chiefly gold smuggling, real estate, extortion and drug trafficking.

  In 1986 Dawood fled from India to Dubai. The Mumbai Police wanted him for the murder of Samad Khan. Over the following years he expanded his gang with the help of his second-in-command, Chhota Rajan. By the early 1990s it had more than 5000 members and brought in hundreds of millions of rupees in revenue each year.

  One feud ran through these years as well. Ibrahim had a long-standing quarrel with another notorious Indian criminal, Manya Surve.

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• 3. After the Bombings

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  In March 1993, a series of bombings struck Bombay, and Dawood Ibrahim is widely believed to have masterminded them. Years later, a senior Indian figure offered a startling account of what happened next.

  In a public discourse in June 2017, Ram Jethmalani said that Dawood had phoned him from London after the blasts. According to Jethmalani, Dawood said he was prepared to come to India and stand trial. His one condition was that police must not subject him to any third degree treatment.

  Jethmalani passed the offer to Sharad Pawar, but the politicians in power did not agree to it. By Jethmalani's account, they refused because they feared Dawood would expose their secrets.

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

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• 4. The Rajan Rivalry

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  By 1992, Chhota Rajan, once Ibrahim's second-in-command, had fallen out with him. Reports say that selective police action against D-Company during the Shiv Sena administration, followed by the syndicate's decline through encounter killings, strengthened Rajan's position in the underworld. This echoes how Ibrahim himself had benefitted from the police campaign against the Pathan gang in the 1980s.

  The Saamana newspaper, the Shiv Sena's mouthpiece, was edited by Bal Thackeray. Its editorial on Rajan expressed relief, and it credited his 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 bombings. Saleem "Kurla" was shot dead in April 1998, and Mohammad Jindran followed in June 1998. Majeed Khan was shot dead on the 1st of March 1999.

  Rajan is believed to have helped Indian intelligence agencies understand D-Company, using his intimate knowledge of its members and operations. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, known as the ISI, was subsequently believed to be behind an attempted assassination of Rajan.

  In February 2010, alleged Rajan associates gunned down the Nepali media baron Jamim Shah point blank, in broad daylight, as he drove to his residence. Shah ostensibly had links with Ibrahim and was the mastermind of a racket producing counterfeit Indian currency inside Nepal. Nepal would feature again in the hunt for Ibrahim's money.

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• 5. Reach of the Syndicate

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  A fact sheet kept by the United States Department of the Treasury describes smuggling routes running through South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. According to that sheet, D-Company shares these routes with the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. The sheet also reports large-scale shipments of narcotics by the syndicate into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

  Ibrahim is also believed to have had contacts with the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In the late 1990s he travelled to Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban.

  The syndicate is said to have consistently aimed to destabilise India through riots, terrorism and civil unrest. It is also said to have pumped fake Indian currency notes into the country.

  Presently, his activities are described as terror funding, drug trafficking, gunrunning, extortion and money laundering. He has invested heavily in real estate in Karachi, Dubai and India. He is believed to control much of the hawala system, a common unofficial method of moving money and remittances outside the view of official agents.

  India Today reported that Ibrahim provided logistics for the 2008 Mumbai attacks carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba. He was also linked to financing a rise in Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks in Gujarat.

  D-Company spreads across Asia, Europe and Africa, yet over 40% of its earnings come from India.

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• 6. Sanctions and Seizures

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  In 2003, the Al-Qaida and Taliban Sanctions Committee of the United Nations Security Council designated Ibrahim a global terrorist, as did the United States. The reason given was his masterminding of the 1993 Bombay bombings. Lal Krishna Advani, then India's Deputy Prime Minister, described the move as a major development.

  Ibrahim is on the NIA Most Wanted list in India. Interpol has wanted him since 1993 for organised crime and forgery.

  The US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control lists him as a terrorist on the Specially Designated Nationals List. It also names him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. In effect, this forbids US financial entities from working with him and allows the seizure of assets believed to be under his control. In 2006, the US government announced a plan to petition the United Nations to have all member states freeze his assets and impose a travel ban on him.

  On the 21st of November 2006, the Mumbai Crime Branch arrested ten members of D-Company after they were extradited from the United Arab Emirates.

  Rankings followed. A Time list of the world's most notorious mob bosses placed him 9th. Forbes ranked him third on its list of the world's 10 most wanted from 2010 until it stopped publishing the list in 2011. In 2011, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation named him number two among the world's 10 most wanted fugitives.

  In 2013, the Nepalese government froze the assets of 224 individuals and 64 entities linked to Ibrahim, as part of an anti-money laundering campaign.

  In November 2017, the Indian government auctioned three of his properties, including the Rounaq Afroz Restaurant, also known as Delhi Zaika. In 2020 it held an e-auction of six properties in his ancestral village in Ratnagiri district, in coastal Konkan, under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act of 1976.

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• 7. The Karachi Question

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  "He Ibrahim does travel out of Pakistan once in a while but Karachi is his base." So Chhota Rajan told India Today, in an interview about his former boss. Indian intelligence agencies, the Research and Analysis Wing and the Intelligence Bureau, have made many attempts to locate Ibrahim since he went into hiding after the 1993 bombings.

  He has been reported at various times to be in Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates. His current location has frequently been traced to Karachi, a claim Pakistani authorities have often denied.

  In 2006, the government of India handed Pakistan a list of 38 most wanted criminals, which included Ibrahim. On the 11th of May, then Home Minister Rajnath Singh told parliament that Ibrahim was in Pakistan and that he would bring him back to India.

  In August 2015, Indian intelligence agencies prepared a dossier on Ibrahim, to be handed over to Pakistan. It said he had nine residences in Pakistan and three Pakistani passports, which he frequently used to travel.

  On the 22nd of August 2020, Pakistan issued two notifications listing and sanctioning key terrorist figures, including Dawood and 87 others. This came amid looming Financial Action Task Force sanctions. The notifications gave three addresses for him in Karachi. They were a house called the White House near the Saudi Mosque in Clifton, a house on 30th Street in the Defence Housing Authority, and a palatial bungalow in the hilly area of Noorabad.

  Pakistan denied that it was admitting his presence. It said the notifications merely repeated the United Nations list of sanctioned individuals and entities. The UN committee had listed him with those same addresses in 2003.

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• 8. Family and Film

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  His wife is Mahjabeen Shaikh Zubeena Zareen. In 2006, their daughter Mahrukh married Junaid Miandad, son of the Pakistani cricketer Javed Miandad. In 2011, another daughter, Mehreen, aged 24, married Ayub, a Pakistani-American.

  On the 25th of September 2011, Ibrahim's only son, Moin, married Saniya, daughter of a London-based businessman. Moin lives in Karachi and teaches in a mosque, having memorized the Qur'an and become a maulana. He is critical of his father's criminal activities. Ibrahim's brother Iqbal and several other family members live in Mumbai, where Ibrahim owns several properties.

  Bollywood has been entangled with D-Company. The syndicate has been linked to financing a number of Bollywood studios and films in the 1980s and 1990s. Ibrahim was linked to celebrities of that time, including the beauty pageant contestant Anita Ayoob and the actress Mandakini. D-Company is also known for extortion and threats aimed at producers and celebrities. It was involved in the murders of the producers Javed Siddique and Gulshan Kumar.

  The cinema has returned the attention. Vijay Maurya played Ibrahim in Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday in 2004, a film based on the 1993 bombings. The 2002 film Company is loosely based on D-Company, as are D, Risk, Shootout at Lokhandwala and its sequel Shootout at Wadala, Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai and its sequel, and D-Day.

  The 2016 film Dongri Ka Raja has a titular antagonist based on Ibrahim, played by Gashmeer Mahajani. Haseena Parkar, from 2017, is a biographical crime film about his sister. Daddy, also from 2017, is based on Arun Gawli, one of his rivals, and features Farhan Akhtar as Maqsood, a character loosely based on Ibrahim. Coffee with D, a comedy about Ibrahim, was released that year too.

  The video game Hitman 2, from 2018, features a Mumbai crime lord named Dawood Rangan, active in the Indian film industry, presumably a reference to Ibrahim. The journalist Hussain Zaidi traced the evolution of the Mumbai mafia in two non-fiction books, Dongri to Dubai: Six Decades of the Mumbai Mafia and Byculla to Bangkok. Shootout at Wadala is based on the first of them. B. V. Kumar wrote an English-language book called DRI and the Dons.

  The story is still being retold. In the 2025 Telugu-language thriller They Call Him OG, the character David Abraham, played by Vincent Asokan, is inspired by Ibrahim. In the 2026 spy thriller Dhurandhar: The Revenge, Danish Iqbal portrays him.

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