Encounter Cop Daya Nayak to be back in Mumbai police

Mangalore Today News Network

Mumbai, Nov 11: After spending the last few years in the shadows courting charges of possessing unaccounted wealth, news has just come in that Mumbai’s celebrity cop Daya Nayak has been given a clean chit and will rejoin duty in the Mumbai Police.

According to a report appearing in Mid Day, senior police officers yesterday rejected the Anti Corruption Bureau’s (ACB) pleas to prosecute the suspended encounter specialist Daya Nayak. The decision, which was jointly taken by outgoing Director General of Police S. Virk, Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) Deputy Inspector General Nikit Kaushik and Deputy Commissioner of Police Sanjay Parande, has cleared the way for Nayak’s return to the force.

Daya Nayak is a Dakshina Kannadiga and hails from Yennehole, a village near Karkala. Born into a poor family, he had left for Mumbai as a boy and had once served as a waiter at an Udupi restaurant in Andheri, attending a night school to complete his education. He was inducted into the police force in 1996.

His career had seen a meteoric rise after he knocked out some underworld elements in a New Year eve shoot out and he was subsequently selected to join an elite squad of ‘encounter specialists’ and was responsible for eliminating 82 gangsters during his tenure.

In 2001, the ACB received a mail, requesting officials to investigate Nayak’s assets. It was alleged the encounter specialist had collected around Rs 1 crore from Bollywood actors. But he was given a clean chit later that year by senior policemen. Nayak suffered the first setback when he was transferred from the Criminal Investigation Unit at Andheri (East) to Kandivli police station in 2002.

On December 3, 2004, Nayak was charged with disproportionate assets worth Rs 41.75 lakh and arrested in 2006. Following investigations, it was discovered that only an amount of Rs 6 lakh, could not be accounted for. Nayak, who has earned a reputation as the nemesis of the Mumbai underworld, had accused the underworld of trying to silence him. Regarding the unaccounted amount of Rs. 6 Lakh, he had explained that the money was part of the Rs 7 lakh the commissioner had given him from his secret fund to pay off some informers.

It may be recalled that in January 2002, he had constructed and donated a school to his native village in memory of his mother Radha Nayak and a galaxy of Bollywood stars including Amitabh Bachchan, Sanjay Dutt, Sunil Shetty and Aftab Shivdasani had attended the event.