Riyaz Bhatkal: Shy student to terror mastermind

Seventeen-year-old Riyaz Shahbandri from Kurla was a shy civil engineering student at Nagpada's Saboo Siddik polytechnic in 1993. He would maintain a low profile and hardly participated in any college events. However, girls found his chocolate-boy looks appealing. Two decades later, he began making headlines as Riyaz Bhatkal, a suspected terrorist who has killed more people than the feared Dawood Ibrahim or the hanged Pakistani terrorist Ajmal Kasab�more than 344 killed from 15 bomb blasts. Still elusive, today he is the most dreaded face of the banned terror outfit Indian Mujahideen. Born in 1976 as Riyaz Ismail Shahbandri in Bhatkal village of Karnataka, he came to be known as Roshan Jamal, while staying at the 60-year-old, two-storey building Qadir Mansion in Kurla here. Today his family owns two rooms in the building, which have been rented out as they wanted to stay away from the police who would often land up at their place inquiring about his whereabouts. His father, Ismail, had shifted from Karnataka to Mumbai for setting up a purse-making business much before Riyaz was born. Despite obtaining a degree in civil engineering, Riyaz couldn't find a job and began helping his father in his business. By then, his elder brother Iqbal had joined a local developer's firm as a civil engineer.