Though the police encounter at Garden View Restaurant at Malad on May 11 had taken out three valuable Skaheel hitmen - Pradeep More, Vijay Bangali and Babloo - police were still baffled by the oddity. The autopsy report also came as a stunner to the gangsters' families.

But after tapping their intelligence network, Crime Branch sleuths soon figured out the anomaly. Caste divisions among the underworld was old hat but police realised that to leapfrog up the pecking order, ambition had to match religious loyalty.

In the Shakeel family, gang members who were assigned plum tasks were invariably Muslims, while the Hindus by virtue of their religion were relegated to `menial' tasks like being couriersand recce specialists. Anyone who wanted to upset the hierarchy - read, become sharpshooters or organisers - had to convert to Islam. With no other way to prove that they had switched over, converts have to get circumcised, police found, much to their amazement.

``It reaffirms the Shakeel gang's communal visage and the discrimination towards their non-Muslim members,'' says a police officer. ``The Dubai-based ganglord's top-rung operatives are without exception Muslims and while dealing with lower rung operatives they propose that if they convert to Islam, Bhai's trust in them will be enhanced and their monetary rewards will increase manifold,'' he reveals. And in a profession where conscience is a misnomer, switching religious loyalties out of pure avarice poses no difficulty.

``It may not be always true but at least in the Malad encounter we have come across this fact,'' says a Deputy Commissioner of Police (Detection), Param Bir Singh. But a little more poking around the underworld yielded supportingevidence for this theory. The trap at the Malad bar was actually meant for Nilesh Kokam, who is among the top-10, most wanted gangsters in Mumbai. Investigations reveal that Kokam, originally a Hindu, also embraced Islam after being circumcised. However, confirming that could take a while as the notorious shooter gave police the slip on that occasion.

Another close Shakeel associate, the Madhya Pradesh-based Vikram Kanjari made the same, small sacrifice to rise among the ranks. Kanjari, who is wanted in the killing of Roopam store owner Bharat Shah late last year, had converted to Islam in 1996 and was rechristened as `Mohammed Ali'. Sunil Sawant alias Sautya, who was a trusted aide of Dawood Ibrahim and who was killed in Dubai in 1994, is another convert. Sawant was killed by the Chhota Rajan gang.

With the Malad hit, police have eliminated three sharpshooters wanted in the slayings of Akhil Bharatiya Sena functionaries Prakash Mayekar, Mangesh Sawant, Khandekar and businessman Joseph Dias besides fiveother murders. The Crime Branch firepower may have rid the city's sewers of three biggies but the sleuths' deductive reasoning has done Fox Mulder proud indeed.