Is slain Khwaja Yunus's soul still haunting the crime branch officers? This is what some policemen wonder. This belief is further strengthened with the dismissal of encounter specialist Arun Borude from the Mumbai Police. He is accused of raping a 15-year-old girl, resulting in her pregnancy.

Borude was perhaps one of the good officers inducted from the 1983 batch of sub-inspectors. He united all the 500 officers from the batch till he got dragged into busting the so-called terror module from Aurangabad in 2003.

Borude came under the scanner after Khwaja went missing. He was one of the investigators. What happened in the next few years could be termed as the dark years for the Mumbai police, particularly the crime branch. The officers who have been indicted were directly or indirectly linked to Khwaja.

It all started with the arrest of Sachin Vaze, one of the investigators. This was quickly followed with the nabbing of four constables believed to be a part of the operations. Praful Bhosle, Hemant Desai, Ashok Khot and Rajan Vanmane had to spend long years in suspension because Khwaja was interrogated at the Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIU) where these officers were attached.

A series of arrests started with Joint Commissioner Shridhar Vagal and his deputy Pradip Sawant, the supervising officers of the case. The duo was later implicated in a fake stamp paper case. The Commissioner of Police Ranjit Sharma too got dragged in the fake stamps scam though he was later absolved from the charges.

In 2005, another officer Aslam Momin got dismissed in an unrelated case. He was one of the officers from CIU at Andheri. Next on the list was another encounter specialist Daya Nayak, attached to the erstwhile CIU. He got dragged into a disproportionate assets case.

When everything seemed normal, another cowboy cop Pradeep Sharma was charged with a cold-blooded murder in 2009. Now, when a select group of crime branch officers thought their fears were unfounded, Borude was named in a rape case.

The sequence of events is all too familiar. All the Crime Branch officers who have been shamed in the past are directly or indirectly linked to the Khwaja Yunus investigations.

Police analyst might attribute highhandedness as one of the main cause resulting in the downfall of these cops.
But there are thousands of other cops who do wrong things each day without getting detected.

Questions are now being raised in the police circles whether the series of jinx would end with Borude or is it still going to take more casualties. Who is going to be the next victim?