Police said they have tracked down about 583 telephone numbers of 23 different places in the country from a mobile phone used by some criminals having links with Dubai and various parts of India. The phone was recovered from a car when police were chasing some kidnappers. Later, print-outs of the numbers contacted by the miscreants with the mobile phone unearthed an international network of criminals involved in murders, kidnapping and extortions all over the country.

Vikram Singh, IGP, Special Task Force (STF), Uttar Pradesh, who has been informed and sent the telephone list by the DSP Kutch, told The Indian Express on telephone that Central coordination to investigate the racket has begun and the results would be known soon. ``However, it would be very early to disclose anything when the situation is very sensitive'', he added.

The sequence of events began after a failed attempt to kidnap a Gandhidham industrialist Babulal Singhvi this September 6, said Kutch DSP Keshav Kumar. Singhvi, who has a number of businesses and has received several threat calls in past, was returning by car from his salt-work when a scooter-rider dropped something in his car, forcing him to halt. Some people emerged from the bushes and tried to attack Singhvi, but he managed to escape.

Realising that he was being chased, Singhvi and some friends decided to take on the pursuers; however, they managed to get away, abandoning the car. Singhvi informed the police, who recovered a mobile phone and SIM card from the car, which was tracked to one Kamal Sharma of Ahmedabad. Sharma's house was raided but he was absent; his antecedents are not known to the police,``We got the printouts of these mobile-phone calls and found that a number of calls had been made to Ahmedabad, Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai, Abu Dhabi, Nepal and several places in Gujarat,'' said Keshav Kumar, Kutch DSP. Some 25-30 phone calls were tracked to Lucknow alone while important contact numbers of Mumbai, Delhi and Darbangha (Bihar) were recalled from the phone's memory.

During that time, notorious gangster Sri Prakash Shukla was killed in a police encounter in Lucknow. ``This gave me the notion that the attempt to kidnap Singhvi and the telephone calls to Lucknow might be somehow linked,'' said Keshav Kumar.

He also contacted Pradeep Srivastava, DCP (south), New Delhi, and informed him about the clues at hand. Delhi Police told him they had tracked some telephone numbers to associates of one Manjeet Singh alias Mange Sardar, of Char Baug (UP) who runs an extensive kidnapping gang in Mumbai and Gujarat. ``The investigation is at a very, very preliminary stage, but it may sure unearth a nationwide racket,'' said Keshav Kumar.

From some telephone numbers, Delhi police also zeroed in on Goga, named in the recently kidnapping of an Indore oil trader Jagdish Moti Ramani recently. Rs 30 lakh in ransom was taken from the businessman, but police arrested three men in these connection, who named Goga.

Kumar said that he had also spoken to police in Mumbai. ``A systematic pattern is emerging linking several places in the country,'' he said. However, Gujarat police believed that the case required a centrally coordinated investigation which would extract starting and good results about the underworld network.