India, May 31 -- They came from different cities, different States, and different countries. One was 23 and from a village in Mirzapur. Another was 66 and had spent 17 years in a Thai prison on a narcotics charge before emerging to handle money and logistics for a man who once tried to kill Chhota Rajan on Dawood Ibrahim's orders.

Between them, in age, geography, and criminal biography, lay the full width of the network that Delhi Police's Special Cell dismantled across multiple states on Friday, eight people who had never, in many cases, met each other, but had been woven together by handlers sitting in Pakistan, Dubai, and Bangkok into a single operational module tasked with carrying out attacks on security installations in India's cap...