Telgi probe mines 100 hrs of wiretaps

That Superintendent, incidentally, is now cooling his heels in prison himself.

Officials reveal that they got their real breakthrough when they were questioning Telgi’s daughter, Sana, sometime in March 2002. ‘‘Mein Baba Se kayee baar baat karti hoon. Kal bhi ki thi (I speak to my father very often. I also spoke to him yesterday,’’) is what the girl told the police.

A special computer software was thereafter devised by the Bangalore police for tracking Telgi’s calls. Once the surveillence began, Telgi’s associates in Mumbai, Bangalore and Nashik came into the net and Telgi probe mines 100 hrs of his phone-tap

several raids were carried out. An early success of the surveillence was the April 2003 arrest of Telgi’s key confidant Mohammad Sayyed in Kolkata from where the police recovered a circular titled ‘special points’ which exposed the professional, managerial style in which Telgi ran his fake stamp business.

Says a senior officer involved in the year-long surveillence operation, ‘‘We never let arrested members of the gang know we learnt about their whereabouts after tapping Telgi’s phone. We didn’t want to kill the golden goose.’’ He added that whenever Telgi switched a mobile number, some precious time was lost in getting the new number on the surveillence net, but they always managed to do it.

A few weeks ago, the Karnataka police handed over the complete set of transcripts of the 1,300 conversations to Mumbai’s Special Investigating Team (SIT) and sources admit the inputs have been ‘‘invaluable’’ and that several of the arrests made in Maharahstra recently can be connected to clues picked up from Telgi’s conversations.

Telgi himself will be confronted with the evidence contained in these transcripts once his trial begins. He will also be handed over a complete set of the telephone transcripts and with it, a list of the action and seizures made on the basis of the wire-taps.

In fact, Telgi himself admitted during interrogatiion that he was, indeed, working the phones while in jail. ‘‘Everyday I used to talk to them (his associates) for hours in the jail,’’ he is quoted as saying, ‘‘I was using mobile phones…They also used to contact (me) over mobile phones. I have contacted many people including my mother. For others, I used to give instructions to them to talk.’’