Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar rubs shoulders with Islamic State chief Abu Bakr-al-Baghdadi and al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on the list of world’s most wanted terrorists. He also featured on the Forbes list of world’s most powerful men several times, which is an evidence of his proximity to the establishment in Pakistan, where he is believed to have taken shelter after he fled India ahead of the 1993 Bombay serial blasts.
Working in tandem with Pakistani spy agency ISI, Dawood engineered the Bombay blasts that left over 250 dead and hundreds injured. In return, he got a permanent refuge and keys to a global underworld network, which he runs from the secret safe house with impunity.
Dawood’s presence in Pakistan is the world’s most open secret. A few journalists have claimed to have met the underworld don, but none have ever written about those meetings.
The last exhaustive account of Dawood’s life in Pakistan appeared in a magazine News Line in the year 2001. The reporter Ghulam Hasnain was reportedly harassed by the ISI and the Pakistani Army over the article which busted Islamabad’s links with Dawood. The magazine’s website doesn’t have a link to that story now.
If Hasnain’s account is to be believed, Dawood, then a 46-year-old, led a very colourful life. Hasnain wrote that Dawood lived like a king in a palatial house spread over 6,000 square yards, with swimming pool, tennis courts, snooker room and a high-tech gym. He wore designer clothes, owned top of the line Mercedes cars and four-wheel drives.