Sources said when police's vehicle reached Borivali, East they dropped them midway and asked them to come to Crawford market in the evening with all relevant documents for verification
Representational Picture
The Mumbai crime branch arrested the mastermind of 2017 diamond robbery case, the accused was absconding for over a year. In the same case, Borivali police had arrested two policemen - Chandrakant Gavare and Santosh Gavas and one woman accomplice. The mastermind has been identified as Manish Shah Alias Raj Mehta, 37 a Santacruz resident.
How he got arrested?
Crime branch officials came to know that Raj often comes to Mumbai and he is still involved in such types of illegal business. Crime branch sent their decoy who posed as a card fraudster and he got in touch with Raj and told him that he has someone's ATM card pin number and bank details in which lakhs of rupees are deposited. He also told him that if they successfully managed to prepare clone cards then they can withdraw money in lakhs. After that Raj became confident and came to Santacruz to meet the police decoy.
Once the deal was done and date of the meeting was fixed, a crime branch team under the supervision of Senior inspector Mahesh Desai along with PSI Vijay Aambavde and Vinayak Naik, Head constables Balshiram Shinde, Vikas Sawant, Ganesh Patil, Mahesh Naik and Raju Pednekar laid a trap. The accused arrived in Santacruz area and was arrested. After the arrest crime branch handover, the accused to Borivali police for further probe.
The case:
According to the police, the incident had happened when a Borivali-based jeweler decided to buy a diamond worth 24 lakh rupees from one Gujarat-based merchant. That time the diamond merchant reached the shop for the deal where a middleman Raj, initiated the transaction deal inside the shop. An officer said,"Suddenly two police personnel arrived there and told them that they had information about this transaction which was illegal in nature. And they seized the diamond and also asked diamond merchant, jeweler and Raj to sit into their vehicle and as they wanted to take them to Crawford market to check if the diamond is original or fake." Sources said when police's vehicle reached Borivali, East they dropped them midway and asked them to come to Crawford market in the evening with all relevant documents for verification. The jeweler got suspicious and reached Borivali police station and lodged an FIR of robbery. Later on, during the investigation, police procured the CCTV footage from a camera which was installed inside the jeweler's shop where policemen had come and seized the diamond. And on that basis, they arrested two policemen.
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