Cops made best use of their resources

NEW DELHI: The Dhaula Kuan gang-rape is one of the rare cases, where the Delhi Police had made the best use of their resources—from manpower to intelligence network—to ensure quick results.
TOI spoke to the investigators to find out what exactly transpired during the week-long operation comprising more than 200 police personnel, which finally led to the arrest of the culprits from the interiors of Mewat in Haryana.
Recalling the incident on November 24, 2010, the south district police said that they knew they would face some real challenges as it emerged that the survivor had been picked up from the Motibagh area.
The then commissioner, B K Gupta, held an emergency meeting with joint commissioner Amulya Patnaik and DCP (south) HGS Dhaliwal and asked them to track down the suspects at all costs. Dhaliwal had all the ‘super inspectors’ of south Delhi in his possession—Rajender Singh, Atul Kumar, Vijay Singh, Aishvir Singh among others and formed 24 teams. Each team was assigned a separate task—from raiding places to developing intelligence. A woman inspector was assigned to accompany the survivor and gather information.
The first clue which the survivor gave was that she had seen a plastic mat in the “truck”.
The police went to the same spot the following night around the same time and checked different vehicles to ascertain which ones used the particular mats. They also zeroed in on tempos. The next clue was that she had seen a word starting with the letter M on the glass panel of the tempo.
More than 3,000 tempos were examined and the word “Muskan” was found to be most commonly used word in the vehicles coming from Mewat.
The survivor then revealed that she had been given 15 notes of Rs 10 denomination folded vertically, which were wrapped around with a rubber band. This, too, was found to be a common practice among truckers from Mewat which they used to pay toll.
On December 1, head constable Islamuddin, later promoted to assistant sub-inspector, got crucial leads about the involvement of a few persons from Dhauj and Tikri Kalan villages of Mewat in the crime. On the night of December 2, around 350 armed policemen assisted by the newly-formed SWAT teams of special cell reached Dhauj.
DCP Dhaliwal took the lead while inspectors and ACPs, along with other policemen, carried a door-to-door search and caught one of the suspects. He led the cops to the tempo used in the crime. One by one, all the perpetrators were arrested in the case.
“It was purely a team effort and the contribution of each member counted. We had the support of our seniors, joint CP and the CP and we managed to crack such a blind case within a week. The police had scientific, circumstantial and physical evidence and we were confident that our investigations will lead to conviction,” Dhaliwal told TOI on Tuesday post conviction.