“The Da Lakhvi Code” continues ……

After a nine-year deputation in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on my return to the Delhi Police in 2002, I had the privilege of heading the Special Cell for a couple of years.

Pramod Kushwaha was an ACP posted with me and was a great asset—he was self-motivated, kept a low profile and was a commendable detective. Before joining the police, he had worked as a computer scientist at a premier research organization of the Government of India. His IT and software skills added considerable value to the cell. He used his cyber expertise—a skill that not many police officers have—to his advantage, solving many a case and busting many a terror group chiefly on account of this skill. The email address he had chanced upon in Kashmir could—if luck was on our side—unravel a treasure trove of intelligence on terror and terrorists.

On his return to Delhi from Kashmir, Pramod, the thirty-five-year-old with only eight years of experience in policing, began working on the email ID he had noted while in Kashmir. The ID—rashid32XXXX@hotmail.com— belonged to one of the contacts of the slain terrorist, and curiously, its IP address was in Delhi. (For the uninitiated, an IP address, or Internet Protocol address, is a numerical label attached to each device connected to a computer network that uses the protocol for communication.

An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing. Put simply, it gives the location and address of an email sender.


To be continued ......