What the Doctor Ordered Continues …………..

The then director of CBI, K. Vijaya Rama Rao, decided to entrust the investigation of these five cases to the nascent Special Task Force (STF) that had been constituted in the CBI only six months earlier.

The STF was created in May 1993, primarily to investigate the 12 March 1993 serial bombings in Mumbai. In the wake of these blasts and their catastrophic aftermath, several controversies had arisen related to the investigation of the case by the Mumbai Police Crime Branch.

Even though the police had cracked the case and arrested several of the accused, allegations of links between some of the perpetrators and powerful politicians of the state, corruption and high- handedness on the part of the police, and the sheer scale of the crime with national and transnational ramifications led to a public outcry for the case to be transferred to the CBI.

The case came to the CBI on 19 November 1993 and we in the STF got busy scrutinizing the voluminous documents that came with the case files and figuring out what our course of action should be. There were several loose ends to be tied up, further investigations to be conducted and absconding accused to be arrested. I was the deputy inspector general (DIG) in charge of the case in the STF.

As it usually happens in the government, when new units are created, they are formed using existing resources—both human and material—by withdrawing them from one branch or another. The number of hands given to you is small and so are other material resources such as office space or transport. . In the midst of these teething troubles came the orders transferring the five serial train blast cases, which demanded investigative legwork all over the country.

Without losing our focus on the Mumbai blasts, we began the process of taking over the case files of the train bombings from the railway police of Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Visits to the crime scenes and consultations with local police officers followed.

To be Continued …………