Even all these years later, one of the transcripts of this technical intelligence division – of a conversation intercepted in 2003 – is vivid in the mind of an R&AW officer I spoke to. ‘It was a conversation between Chhota Shakeel and one of his men in Mumbai. He was abusing [an airline big shot] and asked the aide to go and meet him, to tell him that he has not, after so many years, paid up the promised amount for killing Thakiyuddin,’ the officer recalled. He said there were a few other conversations over the years along similar lines. ‘It fell into a pattern. We had reliable evidence that
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