Mumbai: Four agricultural land parcels tied to the family of India's most wanted terrorist, Dawood Ibrahim, are set to be auctioned this Friday, NDTV reported.
These ancestral properties, located in Mumbake village within Maharashtra's Ratnagiri district, will carry a reserve price of slightly over ₹19 lakh.
Friday's auction of the land, seized under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators Act, 1976, will attract considerable attention due to the land’s connection with the underworld don.
It is not yet known how many bidders will turn up given the fear surrounding the don’s clout in the city.
Former Shiv Sena member Ajay Srivastava, who successfully has bid for the terrorist's properties in the past, is certain to turn up this time as well, according to the report.
The properties that were put out to bid in 2001 include the 1993 Mumbai blasts mastermind's childhood home in Mumbake village, where the lawyer planned a school called Sanatan Pathshala.
However, the shops he has bid for in 2001 remain caught in a legal tangle.
‘I had bid for the bungalow in 2020. A Sanatan Dharm Pathshala Trust has been set up and construction of the school will start soon. I will participate in the auction on Friday. I had taken part in the auction in 2001 to get the fear of Dawood Ibrahim out of people's hearts, and a few people have come forward after that,’ he was quoted saying.
Meanwhile, former journalist S Balakrishnan, one of the bidders at a 2015 auction of Dawood's properties, questioned the auction procedure, saying ‘this is ridiculous. ₹ 19 lakh means nothing to Dawood’.
‘So, in the name of auctioning such properties, they waste the government's money. But why does the government need to do all this? It has the power to take over all the property he owns’, he reportedly said.
In 2015, Balakrishnan had bid ₹ 4.28 crore for the don’s restaurant in Pakmodia Street in Mumbai but lost the property as he could not deposit the money in time.
The former journalist said he ‘risked his life’ by bidding for the restaurant in order to end Dawood's terror.
He claimed he was going to deposit ₹ 4 crore as he had support from the public offering to help him.
‘ But I had only three weeks, which included a Christmas holiday. I requested the government to give me an extension under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators Act and told them that I just needed one more month, but it did not agree," he was quoted as saying.
In 2000 when Dawood’s properties were put up for auction, nobody turned up and no one openly attributed it to fear of the terrorist.