Ishwar Singh

New Delhi, May 16: Delhi police crime branch inspector Ishwar Singh was burning the telephone lines on a fine day in March 2000, trying to trace the calls of Salim “Hatheli”, suspected of running an extortion racket in the capital.

Salim “Hatheli” was a Dawood accomplice.

This evening, 13 years later, Singh told The Telegraph: “During this we stumbled on an intercept where there was a mention of cricket, so we got curious who he was talking to.”

Singh was the chief investigator of the best-known case of match-fixing in cricket. Listening to the calls, he learnt that a bookie was travelling from London to Kochi where India had played South Africa in the first One-day International of that series on March 9, 2000. A phone conversation mentioned “the captain has come”.

India had won the Kochi match by three wickets though both Herschelle Gibbs and Gary Kirsten had scored centuries.

The next week, the two teams travelled to Delhi as the third ODI was to be played in Faridabad on March 15 and checked into a five-star hotel (Taj hotel) in Chanakyapuri.

“We had already put the bookie’s SIM card on surveillance and it crackled to life and we heard the captain, Hansie Cronje,” said Singh.

Singh added that the phone was connected to Sanjeev Chawla, a bookie in the UK. “Cronje and Chawla discussed how the games would be played,” said Singh.

By this time, the entire Delhi police team, including then-joint commissioner K.K. Paul and assistant commissioner of police Pradeep Srivastava, were on board.

The investigation that followed would shake up the cricket world and expose match-fixing scandals in both hemispheres and connect police forces from India and Dubai to those in the UK and South Africa.

Next, the two teams were set to travel to Dubai for another series. Unfortunately for the Delhi police, the phones and SIM cards changed and the trail went cold, said Singh.

“So we decided that we should register a case and make it public. We registered a case of cheating because they cheated the entire public which wanted to watch a cricket match, not a fixed match,” said Singh.

“I busted the case then, and I am so proud that our juniors are carrying on the good work,” Singh said of the Delhi police’s busting of the alleged spot-fixing by Indian bowler Sreesanth and his two Rajasthan Royals teammates.

Singh is still an inspector but is now posted in the special cell that has busted the IPL spot-fixing racket.

“It takes 19 years for an inspector to get a promotion,” he said, enjoying the attention from fellow cops.

Singh said three bookies, including actor Krishan Kumar, were arrested in the Cronje case. But Sanjeev Chawla is still at large and is believed to be in the UK.

In the years between Singh’s cracking the case and today’s revelations, the game of cricket itself has undergone changes and evolved a new format. But sleaze has remained a constant, as the arrests of Sreesanth and others show.

Back in 2000, Cronje denied the allegations initially. But eventually he broke down and admitted to hobnobbing with bookies and named, among others, teammate Hershcelle Gibbs and later, Mohammad Azharuddin (who was subsequently banned from the game).

Cronje also named Pakistani players Salim Malik and Ata-Ur Rahman as being on the take. Authorities across the cricketing world — from South Africa to Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and even the West Indies, began a series of investigations.

Cronje died in a mysterious plane crash in his country on June 1, 2002.

Every so often, death has touched the game of cricket in times of sleaze. Even in the current case, a police inspector, Badrish Dutt, who was part of the team tracking the phone calls, died last week in a case that is seemingly unrelated to cricket.

His body was found along with a lady friend’s in the latter’s Gurgaon apartment.