All 34 deportees that the team was escorting were freed by the mob and one assistant sub-inspector and two constables were injured in the attack. Head Constable Shantaram Jarande, a member of the escort party, said the deportees had prior information of the rescue operation. He said the West Bengal police and the General Railway Police moved in only after the mob had disappeared with the deportees.

Recalling the incident, Jarande said that the 16-member team set out by the Kurla-Howrah Express around 9.15 pm on July 21 in a special compartment with 34 deportees. All was well until the train left Ulberai Railway Station around 3.45 am on July 23. A few hundred metres away from the station the train, which was yet to pick upspeed, was stopped and a mob of around hundred people invaded the special compartment in which the police were travelling with the deportees. The intruders were armed with iron rods, choppers and sticks and were shouting slogans in Bangla.

A part of the crowd then forced the driver to take the train back to Ulberai station where more people were waiting. Their numbers by this time, Jarande recalled, had swelled to around 5,000. While some of them set the deportees free, others broke the door lock and pushed them out.

The team leader, Assistant Sub-inspector Hemant Chavan said he fired a round in the air to scare the mob, but they kept pelting stones on the compartment. He was forced to fire the second round a few minutes later when the mob tried to abduct a woman police constable, Pramila Parab. "Constable Swarne Pingle was hit in the stomach with a bamboo when she tried to rescue her colleague,'' said another member of the escorting party. ``Chavan was hit on the head with an iron bar,'' headded.

Additional Commissioner of Police Raj Khilnani alleged the attack was politically motivated and was engineered by a Forward Bloc MLA. This, he added, was confirmed when the state police control room received information from their West Bengal counterparts.

Khilnani, however, claimed that the Special Branch officers would continue detection and deportation of Bangladeshi nationals illegally staying in the country. ``Not only Bangladeshis, we are trying to flush out all illegal immigrants,'' Khilnani said.

Investigations have revealed that 8,103 Bangladeshi nationals were deported from Mumbai between 1982 and 1998. Over 582 persons have been deported to Bangladesh so far this year.