Two battle-hardened Jharkhand cadre IPS officers—Jaya Roy and Ashish Batra—are spearheading the National Investigation Agency’s (NIA) high-stakes probe into Tahawwur Rana, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks plotter extradited from the US on Thursday. Roy, a 2011-batch dynamo famed for busting Jamtara’s cybercrime hub, and Batra, a 1997-batch veteran who once led Jharkhand’s elite Jaguar force, are grilling Rana in a Delhi cell to unravel his Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and ISI web, per NDTV.
Rana, 64, bankrolled David Headley’s Mumbai recces, enabling the 2008 carnage that killed 166 (Hindustan Times). Roy, now NIA’s Deputy Inspector General, cracked Jamtara’s phishing rackets in 2019, nabbing 200 scammers—her cyber chops now trace Rana’s digital trail, like 231 Headley calls (The Indian Express). Batra, an Inspector General, dodged Maoist bullets as Jaguar chief, bringing raw grit to chase Rana’s Dubai and Kochi links—fresh leads point to a “Dubai man” who knew the plot (The Hindu).
The duo’s teamwork clinched Rana’s extradition—Batra’s US court arguments and Roy’s dossier on LeT’s Hafiz Saeed sealed it (Times of India). “They’re relentless—Rana’s sweating,” an NIA insider told The Economic Times. Under 18-day custody, Rana’s on suicide watch, limited to a soft-tip pen, as Roy maps his 2006-08 India visits (NDTV). Headley’s 2016 depo—naming ISI’s Major Iqbal—fuels their push.
