India's Most Wanted Terrorist

Dawood Ibrahim

For long, Dawood Ibrahim was the man whose name was synonymous with terror before many other able hands took over.

This man's importance cannot be over-stressed but it is said that the ISI shifted him out of the country for a few hours when the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was visiting Pakistan. (India has for long accused Pakistan of providing Dawood with shelter and Islamabad did not want an embarrassment when the prime minister was there for peace talks.)

Son of a police constable, Dawood first dabbled with petty crime before climbing the rungs of the Mumbai mafia. The

 1993 blasts saw Dawood turn from smuggler and criminal to terrorist and traitor.

The ISI is accused of using him to orchestrate the serial blasts and ever since he has been declared a terrorist by the United States in 2005 and the United Nations has put him on a special list of few who are in contact with the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Ayub Memon

Ayub Memon is one of the key members of the first family of terrorism in India.

Till the time Mumbai Police officer Rakesh Maria's eyes fell on top of an almirah in a nondescript Mahim house, the Memons were just another family that owned a business, Tejarat International.

But once Maria's glance fell on a scooter key, which would match one of the vehicles used in the 1993 Mumbai blasts, it would emerge that not only was the company a front to launder money, but it was also the means through which the serial blasts were funded.

Most members of the Memon family fled to Pakistan soon after the blasts and all except Ayub and Tiger Memon returned to India. Four of them family were tried and convicted.

Chota Shakeel

Once the three Khalistan movement lost its steam, the focus of the intelligence agencies shifts to the old hands of modern day terrorism in India outside the Kashmir Valley. Chota Shakeel and others in the list are all involved in one way or the other in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.

In May 2006, Prakash Jaju, actor Priyanka Chopra's recently-fired manager went to the police claiming that he got a threatening call from a man, who claimed he was Chota Shakeel asking him to withdraw the police case he had filed against Chopra. Though the caller's identity was never proven, that is exactly what Shakeel specializes in -- extortion in the movie industry.

Intelligence agencies say Shakeel is a key ISI operative as his men help them with information about all things India and also help the agency to identify suspected Indian intelligence agents even as they land in Pakistan.

He has been charged with attempts to murder Shiv Sena leader Milind Vaidya and several Bollywood personalities. Shakeel continues to live in Karachi with his boss, Dawood Ibrahim and it is also said that he has bought several properties in prime localities in Mumbai under various fronts.

Tiger Memon

If Ayub Memon's role was mainly restricted to funding the Mumbai blasts, Tiger -- or Mushtaq Abdul Razzaq -- Memon was the mastermind, who plotted the entire blasts sitting in his Mahim home.

He is also said to among those who attended a secret meeting -- chaired by Dawood Ibrahim -- outside India where the idea to retaliate for the Babri Masjid riots took shape.

He recruited frustrated Muslim youth, one of whom backed out in the final days leading to the bombings and ratted on the gang on being arrested.

The CBI says he too, like most Dawood associates, lives in Karachi. He too, like Shakeel, is said to have invested heavily in property and is even said to have opened a restaurant in Dubai a couple of years ago.

Abdul Karim Tunda

An Andhra Pradesh intelligence official said soon after the Hyderabad blasts: "The main reason is the ease with which Bangladeshi youth enter the city and blend with the local population. They even are able to get ration and PAN cards in a day's time."

If security agencies are to get to the root of the problem of Bangladeshis entering India at will, this is the man who they will have to stop.

Abdul Karim Tunda has been the recruiter-in-chief for the Lashkar-e-Tayiba ever since it decided to make use of Bangladesh and the porous border that country shares with India.

Tunda, an expert bomb-maker -- a botched attempt that cost him an arm notwithstanding -- was said to have been caught in Kenya in 2006. But this turned out to be a false alarm and it turned out it was a British national and not him.

The 65-year-old was a resident of New Delhi and was behind the blasts in the capital and in Jalandar in 1997. He is also said to be instrumental in bringing together and reviving the Khalistani outfits, which were long thought to be defunct.

In 1997, he is said to have fled to Bangladesh and the intelligence agencies have nothing on him since 2003.

Masood Azhar

The chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad -- one of the deadliest terrorist groups operating in Kashmir -- Azhar was released by India after terrorists hijacked Indian Airlines flight IC-814 from Kathmandu, Nepal, on December 24, 1999.

The hijacked plane was flown to Kandahar in Afghanistan and the passengers were released only after India agreed to the terrorists' demand for setting three dreaded terrorists, including Azhar, free. Then Indian external affairs minister Jaswant Singh took Azhar, Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar and Sheikh Omar Saeed to Kandahar to secure the release of the passengers. Saeed was later sentenced to death by a Pakistani court for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.