"Operation Desert Safari" continues...

Rajbir took me upstairs where two gangsters lay dead with their weapons beside them. They were none other than Virendra Pant aka Chotu and Sanjay Khanna aka Chunkey. The one whose body was found in the stairwell was later identified as Sunil Nathani who had no criminal record. It was unfortunate that he and two of his friends Kartik and Vipin Chaudhary had got mixed up with this gang of kidnappers unwittingly. They all belonged to decent families. This had perhaps happened because they had befriended Rakesh Saraha, ignorant of his criminal antecedents. It was Rakesh, who, on Virendra Pant’s behest, had approached Kartik and Vipin to permit the use of their flat for a few days to keep a kidnapped
person. They had gone along with him for reasons best known to them. All through Thekkat’s
captivity, they had known what was going on but had decided to look the other way.


I informed my Special Director PC Sharma who immediately came to the spot and patted all of us on our backs. He was extremely delighted at our success but not unduly surprised—such was his confidence in us. It was this supreme confidence in all of us and his unique non-interfering and encouraging leadership style, which had played a crucial role in the success of the operation.

The work, however, was not over yet. We immediately obtained details of the train, the coach and seat numbers of Santosh Acharya from Rakesh Saraha and passed them on to D Sivanandhan, my batchmate from the Mumbai branch of the CBI. Famous for his exploits against the Mumbai underworld in his earlier capacity as Joint Commissioner of Police, Crime, Siva was on the job straightaway. In a joint operation with the Mumbai Police, Acharya was caught as the train named August Kranti rolled into Mumbai Central the following morning.
The joint team had boarded the train at the preceding station Vapi, spotted their man and kept him secured until the train reached Mumbai.

We quickly raided B-66, South Extension-Part 2, another hideout of the kidnappers, on the pointing out of Saraha.

To be continued...