When the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police picked up Firoz Deshmukh of the Islamic Research Foundation on July 14, they knew they had someone who could give information on the blasts, he knew Rahil Sheikh of Grant Road.

So they got him to log in and chat with Sheikh while they watched.

In the chatroom, Rahil opened up and gave Firoz a Bangladeshi telephone number. That was the second important breakthrough. The number was immediately kept under surveillance. The police began watching the mails from and to smellofflower@yahoo.com and Ibn_chand@yahoo.com. The password for both these emails was Jannat.

When they spied on the messages and Internet chats on these emails, the police came across several phone numbers and got vital clues which finally led them to the Faisal Sheikh and Muzammil Sheikh.

But Faisal turned out to be a hard nut to crack. The Mumbai police were not sure of his exact role into the blasts until Dr. Tanveer Ansari came into the picture. It was Ansari who spilled the beans on Faisal’s proximity to Lashkar terrorist Azam Cheema.

“In the Bahawalpur base camp, I saw Faisal using Cheema’s Internet, dining with him. They were on back-slapping terms and shared a great rapport. I realised that they were close to each other. The blasts is 100 per cent the handiwork of Faisal,” Dr Ansari told in his statement to the Crime Branch.

The police began interrogating Faisal again. “Lashkar would never attempt any big operation in Mumbai without keeping Faisal in the loop,” Ansari is reported to have told the police. This was later made a part of Ansari’s recorded statement.

Meanwhile, the Crime Branch picked up another Faizal Shaikh from Manmad. But as soon as Faizal was arrested, the Bangladesh number stopped working and Rahil disappeared from the cyber radar.

The confusion got confounded—who was Cheema’s Man Friday? Faisal of Bandra of Faisal of Manmad. For a while, it seemed that the Mumbai police were back to square one. “But we eventually realised that Faisal of Bandra was our man,’’ said a source. “Faisal led us to several major breakthroughs that opened the whole case for us,” says Deputy Commissioner of Police, Detection, Dhananjay Kamlakar.

Faisal, however, had managed to hoodwink an entire team of investigators till Ansari’s arrest. It was after that his brother Muzammil was picked up in Bangalore. The case opened up again. Muzammil told the police that Faisal had also sent him and his brother, Rahil, to Pakistan via Zahedaan in Iran for training. It was now clear that Faisal held the key to the 7/11 case and that he was not talking.

Faisal remained tightlipped even when he was put through a lie-detector. After a series of truth serum tests, he began to sing. He spoke of the involvement of Pakistanis in the operation, how they assembled the bombs at Mohammad Ali’s house at Govandi, Ehsanullah’s import of 15 kg of RDX to Mumbai, the bombs being kept at his house on July 10, a day before the blasts (a swab examination of his Perry Cross lane house confirmed remnants of RDX), how they were left on the trains and how one of the bombers, Salim from Lahore, could not get off the train on time after placing the bombs.