Patna, Feb 4 (IANS): A Bollywood masala flick was the inspiration for three students who decided to track down underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, a police officer said Tuesday.

The three school students had embarked on a "mission" to get-rich-quick by hunting down Dawood Ibrahim and handing him over to the authorities. The sheepish students are now back home.

Patna Senior Superintendent of Police Manu Maharaj said the class nine students of Patna based St Michael High School were inspired by "D-Day", a Bollywood film apparently made on Dawood Ibrahim.

"After watching film `D-Day', three of them decided to catch Dawood Ibrahim, the way it was in film, hand him over to the Indian government and get a huge reward," Manu Maharaj said.

Manu Maharaj said that the students revealed their motive after returning home.

According to him, they wanted to make plenty of money in a short span of time by catching Dawood Ibrahim after they had done some research on the internet. They found out that Dawood had a $25 million reward on his head.

Action spy-thriller "D-Day" features Arjun Rampal, Irrfan Khan and Huma Qureshi in key roles and is a fictional story about the hunt for Dawood Ibrahim, played by Rishi Kapoor in the film.

Interestingly, the grandmother of one of the three boys lives in Karachi in Pakistan.

Initially, the students thought it would be easy to visit Karachi to complete their mission.

They had also downloaded a house from an internet site that purportedly belonged to Dawood Ibrahim in Pakistan and had studied a map and chalked out their plan to enter the compound to catch him, police officials said.

But the house turned out to be the Abbottabad residence of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, which US special forces stormed to kill him in 2011.

The students went missing last week and only returned home Sunday night after their mission failed.

India's top intelligence agencies are trying hard for years to catch the fugitive Dawood Ibrahim and have not yet achieved a breakthrough.