Delhi cops tracked faceless man for 3 yrs

At a time when UP police gave up hope to find him, Delhi Police quietly started tracing him, reports T Srivastava & V Singh.

At a time when the UP Police believed their biggest headache, mafia don Brijesh Singh, was dead, the Delhi Police quietly started tracing him. Picking up bits and pieces of information, the special cell has been on Singh's trail for the last three years.

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“It was a mountainous task for us. He had been on the run since 1986. We had no photograph of him. He was a faceless man for us. Our teams worked on technical and human inputs,” a senior police officer said.

One disappointment followed another. Even after being spotted in Delhi two years ago, Singh escaped as the police did not have his photograph to establish his identity. A number of raids failed as police teams travelled extensively in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and Mumbai.

Then information started dribbling in. It was found that Singh regularly visited Delhi. He even had a safe house here. The only photograph available of him was with the UP Police, which it had procured from the records of Benares College, but it was hardly of any use since he was 17 then.

Sources said that five years ago, he’d gone to attend a marriage in UP and the police had kept the phone number of his relatives under surveillance.