The fifth and last accused to be arrested for the gang-rape of an 18-year-old Mulund telephone operator in the Shakti Mills compound, Ashfaque Shaikh, was using a network of friends to keep him informed about the police search parties while he was on the run.The NM Joshi Marg police, who investigated the August 22 gang-rape of the 22-year-old photojournalist in the same mill compound, had picked up Ashfaque on August 25 but released him after the woman said he was not among her rapists.Once he was released, Ashfaque, 27, worried that his friends may rat on him, took off to Chennai with a sex worker from Kamathipura before moving to Guntur in Andhra Pradesh. All the while, he was constantly in touch with his friends in Mumbai. But he never used his mobile phone, which he had discarded soon after he was released from police custody. He only used public pay phones. Once his friends told him the August 22 case has been solved, he returned to Mumbai on September 5. After he got off the train at Dadar, he sent the sex worker back to Kamathipura and asked her to keep him informed of the police activity.“He then got information that we were looking for him for the July 31 rape case,” said a senior Crime Branch officer. “He immediately fled to Ajmer. We kept a watch on his girlfriend. We also noticed there was a small boy who ran errands and received some five to six calls every day. The boy always handed over the phone to the sex worker. We knew it was Ashfaque on the other end and traced him to Ajmer. But he soon ran away to Vadodara. He then told the sex worker that he will come back to Mumbai. We set a trap for him and arrested him on Saturday.”Ashfaque has two children and his family lives in Darbhanga, Bihar. He was produced at the Esplanade court on Sunday and was sent to judicial custody till September 19.