New Delhi, April 28 -- Salim Dola, a 59-year-old alleged drug lord and close associate of India's most wanted fugitive Dawood Ibrahim, touched down at Delhi airport on Tuesday morning in handcuffs, deported from Istanbul after Turkish intelligence and local police tracked him to a residential hideout in the city's Beylikduzu district, according to news agency ANI.

Salim Dola's arrest, executed under an Interpol Red Notice, ends nearly a decade on the run and hands Indian narcotics investigators their most significant D-Company-linked catch in years.

Salim Dola is not a name that surfaced recently in Indian law enforcement files. A resident of Dongri, the same Mumbai neighbourhood that shaped much of organised crime in India, Dola has be...