India's most wanted man has now officially slipped out of the intelligence's radar. Unless this is some kind of ploy before there is a big development on the Dawood front, this is a major embarrassment for the central government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and in particular for intelligence czar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.
The name Dawood Ibrahim shot to the country's headlines on the ill-fated morning of March 12, 1993. It’s the day Mumbai, then Bombay, came to a standstill. A series of blasts at the city’s most iconic installations like the Air India Building, the Bombay stock Exchange and Zaveri Bazar left a total of 257 persons dead and thousands wounded.
Dawood was listed as one of the main accused in the chargesheet filed by the Mumbai Police. It has been over 20 year, as yet unsuccessful, hunt to track down India’s most wanted man.
His address was traced on multiple occasions to different places in Karachi, Islamabad and Dubai. The most frequent was in the Clifton neighbourhood, Karachi, under protection of Pakistani intelligence agency ISI.
In 2001, India submitted a list of 50 most wanted men to Pakistan. Dawood was number 8 on that list.
Over the years Dawood has changed his identity and place of residence. The last Indian TV channel to locate Dawood was CNN-IBN in 2008.
We tracked the last passport issued to the underworld don by the Government of Mali under a pseudo-name Shaikh Abdul Rehman. Dawood's passport number was - A 1332945. It was issued to him on April 6, 2005.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had made the capture or extradition of Dawood a campaign issue with even Modi talking about it on a number of occasions.
This latest controversy was sparked off by former Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar saying Dawood was willing to surrender when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was in power, but eventually that conversation went cold.
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