Sharma in Mumbai on Thursday. (PTI)

Mumbai, May 7: Encounter specialist Pradeep Sharma, sacked by Mumbai police last year for alleged links with the underworld, was today reinstated by the Maharashtra Administrative Tribunal which said his dismissal was unsustainable under law.

Sharma, 48, a senior inspector who gunned down 112 gangsters during a sustained police campaign, was sacked on August 31, 2008, on the basis of telephone intercepts allegedly linking him to gangs headed by Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan.

His lawyer Sandeep Mutalik said: “The dismissal was ordered under Article 311 2 (b) of the Constitution without a departmental inquiry. The tribunal felt the dismissal was unsustainable under legal provisions. The MAT order says, if required, an inquiry could be initiated against Sharma but he should be allowed to present his arguments.”

Mutalik said the tribunal had ordered the payment of back wages since his dismissal.

Sharma, at the hearing with his teenage daughter, said he was happy he got justice.

The 1983 batch police officer and his deputy Daya Nayak shot to fame when they were posted at the Andheri crime intelligence unit in 1998 and carried out encounters over three years. They were part of investigations into the Kandahar hijack and the Bollywood-underworld nexus case in which diamond merchant Bharat Shah was arrested.

Sharma’s name came up in the probe into the custody death of Ghatkopar bus blast accused Khwaja Yunus in 2003, in which several police officers were arrested and suspended.

Yunus, a chemical engineer, was arrested in 2002 after the blast but disappeared from police custody. Bombay High Court later ruled his death should be treated as a custody death based on witness accounts of co-accused who saw him being beaten up a night before his disappearance.

Sharma was transferred to Amravati in 2007, but returned as head of the Kandivli unit of the crime branch.

Sharma was also alleged to have helped a builder, Alpesh Ajmera, grab a plot.