When this correspondent pointed out that the confessions may lack credibility with the public as they are likely to have been obtained under severe duress, the ATS officer said the day a confession is recorded by an officer of deputy commissioner of police rank under MCOCA, the accused is presented before the chief metropolitan magistrate, who asks if the confession was made under duress.

"None of the accused said they were tortured into making the confessions," the ATS officer claimed.

"In any case, these people are trained in Pakistan not to break, no matter what," says the officer. "They are also trained to lead their interrogators astray. They would say something, which we would follow up for a couple of days before discovering that we had been led up the garden path with false information."

"There is nothing unusual in the accused withdrawing their confessions," a senior police officer unconnected with the 2006 blasts investigation, told rediff.com, "Almost all the accused in the 1993 Mumbai blasts case later withdrew their confessions, alleging that they were tortured and made to confess. But when the verdicts were being passed, you didn't hear them saying that. All you heard was that, 'We are poor people who made a mistake because we were paid money.'"

Unlike the 1993 blasts, where the police tracked down the owner of a car abandoned by the bombers in Worli, north-central Mumbai, and quickly connected the dots of that conspiracy, the ATS had no such luck in the 2006 bombings.

Also, the 1993 blasts were executed by known criminals, who the police were familiar with. There were no such leads in this case. The bombers had vanished without a trace.

The ATS, despite its impressive name, was also poorly staffed. On the day the blasts occurred, the ATS had a staff of eight police inspectors and eight sub-inspectors. This would expand in the weeks to come, as the trail of the bombers extended well beyond the city and Maharashtra to other parts of the country and overseas, to 250, including senior officers of the rank of additional and deputy commissioners of police and constables.

The Squad had its first breakthrough when it noticed the same numbers turning up on the records of phone calls made from the city to Bangladesh and Nepal. That led them eight days after the blasts to Kamal Ansari, a resident of Madhubani in Bihar, who the ATS claims, had some quantity of RDX with him; the deadly explosive was used in the blasts.

With Ansari's arrest, the ATS officer says, other links came to light, none more important than Faisal Sheikh, a young Mumbaikar, who allegedly helped assemble the team for the Pakistani masterminds behind the blasts.

"Electronic surveillance played an important role in cracking the case," says the ATS officer, "as did the later narco-analysis and brain mapping."

The ATS claims it also has witnesses who saw some of the accused at railway stations and in the trains. A Pakistani terrorist belonging to the Al Badr group, arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir police and brought down to Mumbai last year, the ATS says, has recorded a statement that he had seen Faisal and some of the other accused at a terror training camp in Pakistan. Image: The mangled compartment of one of the trains, soon after the blasts. Photograph: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images Also read: Questions & answers on the Mumbai blasts

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