India, May 11 -- It was around midnight on August 15, 2018, around five years after rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead by two bike-borne assailants, when the case was cracked by a Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) team, quite by a stroke of luck.

The ATS team was questioning Sharad Kalaskar, an accused arrested in its then ongoing investigation into a haul of arms and ammunition at Nalasopara, when he allegedly blurted out that he and his associate Sachin Andure had shot Dabholkar, stumping his interrogators. Andure was also in the ATS' detention back then, according to sources familiar with the investigation into Dabholkar's murder.

Kalaskar's interrogators immediately alerted the ATS' then chief Atul Chandra Kulkarni, w...