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Daya Nayak, Hits: 83; Pradeep Sharma, Hits: 105

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Mumbai’s famed encounter specialists—or Dirty Harrys as the international press labelled them—are now performing rather menial policing tasks or, worse, are suspended from duty and facing court cases for their exploits in the trigger-happy days from the mid-’90s to 2004. Perhaps the best known in this motley group is sub-inspector DayaNayak. In his heyday, Nayak sported the swagger of a police commissioner, boasted of six mobiles when even owning one was expensive, kept unlisted numbers of underworld bosses and worked through an enviable network of informers to plan and execute "encounters" with such precision and drama that they might have been pre-scripted. Nayak’s nemesis lay in his dare-devilry and love of publicity. Then on a monthly salary of Rs 9,000, he thought nothing of raising more than a crore for a school in his village in Mangalore, or encouraging Bollywood to script films around him. At last count, Nayak had 83 ‘encounter’ victims to his credit. He now faces charges of having been in the underworld’s pay.

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Nayak’s mentor, inspector Pradeep Sharma, also set his sights on the underworld. But he ran into some trouble in the infamous Khwaja Yunus case which involved the custodial killing of the ’02 bomb blast suspect. According to the CID, Sharma’s role was suspected, but there was no hard evidence. He was, however, transferred to Amravati on the orders of the Bombay High Court because he was believed to be interfering in the probe intoYunus’ killing. He then reported sick and refused to take charge at his new posting. Of his tally of 105 victims, Sharma rates an encounter at Goregaon on the Western Express Highway his "best". In that encounter, he bumped off four of those apparently involved in the ’03 Mulund train blasts. Last month, his name allegedly surfaced in a case where one builder accused another of issuing a"supari" to bag a south Mumbai real estate deal. Mumbai’s other DirtyHarrys—inspectors Vijay Salaskar and Arun Borude, senior inspector PrafulBhonsle, assistant police inspector Sachin Vaze and two others—too stand charged with murder. In Mumbai’s trigger-happy decade, these encounter specialists killed between 50 and 100 alleged gangsters and extortionists every year till a tough decision by the top brass in ’04 clamped down on theirsharpshooting.

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