From the early 1960s to late 1970s the Bombay Underworld was dominated by syndicates controlled by Haji Mastan, Karim Lala and Varadrajan Mudaliar.

Shabir Ibrahim was assassinated on February 12, 1981 by Manya Surve, and his brother Dawood took command, leading to a gradual escalation of violence throughout the 1980s as the latter systematically eliminated his rivals.

Dolas had got his start running several successful extortion rackets for the criminal-politician, Ashok Joshi's gang at Kanjurmarg.

[7] Minty Tejpal, reporter for the news and current affairs video magazine Newstrack captured the entire shootout live in 1991.

A. Khan, the Anti-Terrorism Squad received a tip-off from a police informer that Dolas and his gang were hiding in the A wing, flats no.

002 and 003 in the Swati building at the Lokhandwala Complex, a posh upper middle class residential area.

Qavi spotted Gopal Rajwani at the main gate, but did not arrest him for fear of surprising the gangsters hidden inside the building.

ATS officers Sunil Deshmukh, Z. M. Gharal Bhanupratap Bharge and Qavi along with Inspector Ambadas Pote and two constables were the first to walk into the ground-floor flat where the seven were watching television.

At around 2:00 he police again assaulted the flat and another gangster was killed, but fierce gunfire drove back the attack.

Khan used the loudspeakers to request residents to go to the kitchen and lie on the floor, to avoid accidentally getting hit by a stray bullet.

By 2:45 a crime branch team lead by ACP Gobse arrived and held discussions with Khan hoping to halt the encounter to attempt to persuade the gangsters to surrender.

[2] The fugitive underworld don Chotta Rajan was also extremely vocal in criticising the police operation as a "fake encounter".

[1] Baljeet Parmar, a longtime commentor on organised crime also alleged that Dolas had eventually attempted to surrender, but was gunned down.

In 1995, when the BJP-Shiv Sena government came to power in Maharashtra, Khan's promotion to the rank of Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) was stalled and he was transferred to Nagpur.

[3] Gopal Rajwani, the gangster who had inadvertently managed to avoid being caught in the crossfire, returned to Ulhasnagar and joined politics as a Shiv Sena member in 1995.

He was eventually shot dead by four of rival mobster Pappu Kalani's henchmen on 24 January 2000 in the premises of the First Class Magistrate's court there.

[12] The infamous shootout was immortalised in the 2007 film Shootout at Lokhandwala, starring Sanjay Dutt as ACP Aftab Ahmed Khan, Vivek Oberoi as Maya Dolas, Tushar Kapoor as Dilip Buwa and Amrita Singh as Maya's mother Ratnaprabha Dolas.

The movie also featured the real-life former ACP Aftab Ahmed Khan in a cameo role as his superior, the police commissioner Krishnamurthy.

In a May 2007 interview, he told the Times of India newspaper that the encounter was fake, while the film sought to depict it as an actual event.