After the special hit squads, whose sole brief was to gun down gangsters, were disbanded in May-June 1998, the Police Department's Encounter Raj bit the bullet. Or so the public thought. A couple of months later, when the Judge Augiar report was made public, police gave the impression that the wanton killings had ceased. Only, they hadn't. In October, six special teams were resurrected to continue the bloodletting. Officially, however, they didn't exist.

Juggling with jargon, the police simply rechristened the squads as `Special Teams' and each time a gangster was felled, the encounter was attributed to the local police station.

In fact, police had notched up just 10 encounters in nine months priorto setting up the Special Teams. After October 1998, 53 gangsters were killed in 43 encounters. The number had increased 10-fold.

The teams -- four zonal, one regional and one from the Crime Branch -- have been operating under the jurisdiction of their respective deputy commissioners of police: in Zone-II (DCP K Venkatesham), Zone-III (DCP Sunil Paraskar), Zone-VI (DCP S Bodke) and Zone-VII (DCP K L Prasad). These include the teams under Assistant Police Inspector (API), Vijay Salaskar, of the Nagpada police station (Zone-II). Like the team under API Pradeep Sharma of the Andheri police station (Zone VII).

Though the city is divided into four regions, the lone regional Special Team is under the jurisdiction of Additional Commissioner of Police Rakesh Maria (North-West). It has been functioning under the guise of an Anti-Extortion Cell. The last team belongs to the Crime Branch, which rotates the officers in its death squad.

The sole brief of the Special Teams is to track down and slay gangsters in aneffort to muzzle the underworld. Free of routine policing, they are also not bound by their physical jurisdiction. For instance, the Zone-II team has executed three encounters, all of them outside its jurisdiction (Zones II, V and X). Also, despite being attached to the Andheri police station, the Zone-VII team has notched up its successes in the limits of other police stations, viz, Khar, D N Nagar. Police believe that shakling the teams to their respective zones would blunt their effectiveness. Senior police officers admit to the existence of these teams only in private. Secrecy and stealth is the best way to deal with gangsters and smash organised crime, they feel Says DCP Sunil Paraskar: ``The teams are very important for special investigations and tracking down dreaded gangsters.'' But that is as far as the officer is willing to go in acknowledging the existence of the squads.