Pakistan has finally admitted that India’s most wanted, the perpetrator of the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts that killed 257 people, is in Karachi. This, after years of denying at all international fora that the 64-year-old was on their land.

So how did this son of a constable graduate to being a terrorist who planned and executed serial blasts in India’s commercial capital scarring the city and its psyche forever. Born in December 1955 in a Konkani Muslim family, in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri, Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar’s father Ibrahim Kaskar was a head constable in the Mumbai Police and his mother Amina a homemaker.

Read: Terrorist Dawood Ibrahim is in Karachi, admits Pakistan; imposes sanctions

Brought up in Mumbai’s Dongri area, Dawood dropped out of school after initial years of studies when father could not afford to pay for his education. He then turned to petty crime and hooliganism and at 19 was full time into crime and was hobnobbing with the then underworld don Haji Mastan.

It is reported that once his father was on a Mumbai police team probing a bank heist when he realized that his son was behind the robbery. Ibrahim Kaskar is reported to have dragged his son to a police station and made him confess.

This reprimand, however, did not keep Dawood away from the dark world of crime. By the 1970s, he and his brothers had formed the Dawood company that dealt in arms and drug smuggling.

By mid 80s, Dawood shifted base to Dubai (UAE) and expanded his business buying stakes in shipping companies, which helped him smuggle arms, drugs and counterfeit notes into India.

In the 1990s he set up a base in Pakistan and established links with terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba. In March 1993 he planned and executed the Mumbai bombings. In two hours and 10 minutes, between 1.30 pm and 3.40 pm, on March 12 , 1993, the city was rocked by 13 bombs that hit the city’s most iconic buildings such as the Bombay Stock Exchange, Air India office, the Plaza cinema among others.

Since then, the perpetrator of the Mumbai blasts, enjoyed patronage in Pakistan, despite being proscribed by India, the US and many other countries. 

The US Treasury Department has put Dawood Ibrahim alias Sheikh Dawood Hassan in the list of ‘Specially Designated Global Terrorist’ and his assets within the US have been frozen.

The designation freezes any assets belonging to Ibrahim within the US and prohibits transactions with American nationals.