Mumbai, June 2: Ab Tak Chhappan is far behind. The encounter gun clocked 100 today.

Pradeep Sharma, one of Mumbai police encounter specialists, this afternoon gunned down Kamalakar Satardekar, an accomplice of gangster Chhota Rajan. Satardekar was Sharma’s 100th target.

Mumbai police, whose reputation have been sullied of late by a string of scandals, were quick to tout the count as a “watershed” but Sharma said a century was hardly the prize he was after.

“My work will go on,’’ he said. “Police officers don’t go around looking for encounter killings because less encounters mean lesser crime and that is what society wants.”

Sharma is far ahead of the other encounter specialists in the death count. Senior officer Vijay Salaskar is at 40, Praful Bhosle at 77, Ravindra Angre at 51 and sub-inspector Daya Nayak — the inspiration for the movie Ab Tak Chhappan — at 82.

Sharma’s “feat” has come at a time some of his fellow encounter specialists have been sucked into scandals. Sachin Vaze, who works under Sharma, is facing charges that he spun an encounter tale after allegedly killing in custody a blast accused.

Allegations of links with the underworld are dogging Nayak, who has been shifted from the coveted crime branch.

But Sharma’s slate is clean in a career that has spanned 14 years. A 1983 batch police officer, Sharma, a post-graduate in science, had his first encounter in 1990 when he killed Rahim and Javed, two sharpshooters of the Dawood Ibrahim gang.

He was soon shifted to the Narcotics Control Bureau. Mumbai was then the hub of narco sales. Here, too, Sharma hogged the limelight when he killed Abdul Hakim Haula, a Nigerian drug trafficker.

Some of Sharma’s headline-grabbing targets were Dawood’s close aide and sniper Sadiq Kalya, Rafiq Dabbawala of the Subhash Thakur gang and Vinod Matkar of the Rajan gang.

Largely credited for helping the film industry get rid of extortionists, Sharma was instrumental in killing four key members of the Abu Salem gang at Andheri in 2002. Salem, who had threatened Aamir Khan after Lagaan became a hit, was trying to tighten his hold over Bollywood. The encounter broke the spine of the Salem gang in Mumbai.