Acting on a tip-off, an armed squad of Vakola police laid a trap for the truck along the deserted Hans Bogra Road connecting Western Express Highway with Mumbai Univeristy's Kalina campus at 4.00 am.

The trap had been laid by assistant inspector Rauf Sheikh's squad on the basis of information provided by retired army subedar major Prakash Vora. The retd major had, during his morning walk on August 11, overheard four Kashmiris discussing the consignment's delivery inside a truck parked on the Hans Bogra Road.

According to Vora, the four Kashmiris were seated in a light-blue Tata truck bearing the registeration number JK02-A-7147. They returned the next day and the day after, and were apparently waiting fora jeep in which the consignment was to be transferred, he said.

``I didn't have problems understanding the language, because I was posted in Kashmir during my army years. They were around 35 years old, and one of them was armed with a sub-machine-gun,'' he said. ``I would have shot them if I had my gun with me,'' he added.

The place along Hans Bogra Road, where the four met, is usually deserted after darkness. In the morning, it is frequented by fitness freaks.

After Vora passed on the information to Vakola police on Thursday night, two days after repeated attempts to contact one of his friends in the police force, all police stations were alerted.

The hunt for the truck assumes significance because intelligence agencies had prior information on the movement of some Kashmiris allegdly involved in smuggling a huge consignment into Mumbai. ``The identity of the Kashmiri militants matches the description of the suspects,'' said an intelligence officer.

A senior officer attached to the crime branchconfirmed they were synthesising the information received from Vakola police.

Interestingly, the place where the suspected militants met is barely three kilometers away from Golibar in Santacruz, where a bomb went off on February 27 this year, killing one and injuring two persons. There were similar blasts at Kandivli and Virar the same day, which left four persons dead and 22 injured.