Majid Khan is the third bomb blast accused to be eliminated by henchmen of Chhota Rajan, a former aide of D-Company supremo, Dawood Ibrahim. The two jointly ran mafia operations from Mumbai till precisely six years ago when a disastrous sequence of events polarised and splintered the gangs. The serial bomb blasts of March 12, 1993, in which 257 persons were killed and 713 injured, changed the mixed composition of Dawood's gang and led to his estranged partner going public about how he would target the perpetrators of the crime. Besides Majid Khan, two more serial blast accused, Salim Kurla and Mohammed Zindran havebeen gunned down in Mumbai.

Even as the serial blasts -- described in the voluminous charge-sheets as an act of war and attempt at destabilising the country -- continue to play on the collective psyche of the underworld, the in-camera trial against 204 persons continues at a ponderous pace at Mumbai's Arthur Road Jail. Of the 204 accused, 40 were declared as absconding and of the remaining persons, only 50 are incarcerated. The other conspirators are all out on bail.

Given the extent of loss of life and property, the serial blast case is one of unparalleled importance and the evidence garnered by the Mumbai police and later the CBI. But given the fact that the masterminds of the conspiracy -- Dawood Ibrahim and the clique of Indian and Pakistani smugglers who helped smuggle the explosives and arms and execute the plan of destruction and destability -- are all safe in foreign shores, the Arthur Road trial has been reduced to a numbers game.

CBI officials point out that by the time they took charge, thefigures and reach of the case was already mind-boggling. Besides the unprecedented number of accused, the Mumbai police had cited some 3,500 witnesses, amassed evidence running into thousands of pages. And what has the CBI achieved? The formal trial in the serial blast case began in June 1994 and almost five years later, the agency has at least managed to prune the list of witnesses to just 550 persons, 470 of whom have now been examined. But members of the prosecuting team are quick to point out that there has been no delay in calling of witnesses and that the hearings in Arthur Road's designated court were proceeding on a day-to-day basis.``We have a 50-member team working on the case. The trial may not conclude by the turn of the century but the outcome will be invaluable for pinning down perpetrators of the dastardly crime,'' a CBI official said.

What is important is that the linchpins of the three-tier conspiracy have managed to escape CBI's dragnet and continue to elude arrest. The absconders includeDawood Ibrahim, who recruited and trained operatives for the serial strikes and his associates like Abu Salem who is alleged to have procured many fire-arms. Dawood left for Dubai shortly before the blasts and then shifted his base to Karachi. Salem continues to live in Dubai and was back in the limelight due to the taped conversations the Delhi Police brandished after the arrest of Romesh Sharma.

While members of the D-Company had been the facilitators and spotters for the attack, it was two Pakistani smugglers, Taufiq Jaliawala and Sayed Arif who had acted as the conduits for the ISI. They also acted as liaison agents for the ring of smugglers like Mohammad Dosa and Mushtaq or Tiger Memon whose men landed the consignments of arms and ammunition at Dighi and Shekhadi in coastal Maharashtra between January and February 1993.

Intelligence sources say that while Sayed Arif is still alive, Taufiq Jaliawala died some three years ago in a road accident near Riyadh.Interrogations of the accused and theversions of the two approvers in the case, in fact, have led the investigating agencies to believe that according to the original plan of Dawood, Dosa and Memon, the blasts were to be simultaneously triggered off in Mumbai and other commercial centres like Bangalore and Lucknow. This, in fact, had been the intelligence tip-off received by the Research and Analysis Wing in January 1993 and which had been discussed in the Joint Intelligence Committee.

It was Tiger Memon who apparently -- after he had finalised his escape plans -- had sabotaged the plan and gone ahead with his part of the plan in Mumbai without consulting either Mohammad Dosa or Dawood Ibrahim. Tiger Memon apparently went into a fit of paranoia after the March 9 arrest of one of his aides, Gul Mohammad and activated the Mumbai network. Among the establishments in which bombs exploded were the Bombay Stock Exchange, the Century Bazar, the Bank of Oman, the Javeri Bazar as well as the Centaur and Sea Rock hotels.

The CBI has been filingsupplementary chargesheets in the case as and when an important accused has been arrested and added the crucial aspect of international conspiracy to the plot. Sufficient proof has been marshalled about how in all 27 operatives had received arms training along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and about all the help they received in their onward journey from Mumbai to Dubai. The smugglers along with the trained subversives, the chargesheet alleged,``were exhorted to teach a lesson to Hindus and wage war by using weapons and explosives against the Government of India.''