""Ayeessa Kya?" (Is it so?)" continues...

With the victim’s consent and cooperation, the two telephones were kept under observation by the ATS. By painstaking monitoring with the help of the Ahmedabad Telephone Authority, ATS had come to the conclusion that the calls were made through D-TAX (Digital Telephone Automatic Exchange) located at Khurshid Lal Bhawan, Janpath, New Delhi. Kuldip Sharma, DIG (ATS), wanted help from the STF of the CBI, of which I was then the DIG, to track down the calling number and, if successful, to organize an operation to nab Latif.

On the same day I directed H.C. Singh, Superintendant of Police (STF) and M.K. Bhat, Deputy Superintendant of Police (STF) to visit the Mahanagar Telephone Nagar Limited (MTNL) Headquarters at Janpath, New Delhi. They met Sunil Saxena, Deputy General Manager, Janpath D- TAX. Saxena, though extremely responsive and warm, explained that it was virtually impossible to track down the calling number in Delhi because of the following reasons:
(i) The call must last for at least 10 to 12 minutes for it to be tracked from the called number in Ahmedabad to the calling number in Delhi.
(ii) As and when the number in Ahmedabad got called in future by Latif, the local exchange to which it belonged (Naurangpur Exchange) had to be alerted.
(iii) The Naurangpur Exchange would then alert the Ahmedabad D-TAX which in turn would track and tell whether the call had been routed to D-TAX 1 or D-TAX 2 in Delhi.
(iv) Even if the concerned D-TAX in Delhi was informed while the call was in progress, there
were over thirty exchanges in the city from where the call could originate. Further, a few of the thirty exchanges were non-electronic. If the call originated through a non-electronic
exchange, which was quite likely, there was no way the number could be trailed further.

To be continued...