Vadodara court remands Maria Susairaj to 4-day police custody

“Despite being aware about the facts and details, she has refused to cooperate, instead providing ambiguous and confusing answers to mislead the investigators about the whereabouts of the absconding co-accused, Paromita Chakrabarty and Hendricks Fernandez, who are also the main accused.” The Vadodara police have already arrested one more accused, Sunil Jaiswal, in the fraud.

The plea states that Maria met the co-accused, Paromita, during her stay in Mumbai’s Byculla Women’s Jail, as an undertrial in the murder of TV executive Neeraj Grover. Maria, whose family hails from Mysore in Karnataka, had told the police after her arrest on Thursday, that she had been living with Paromita for the last two years. The Vadodara crime branch contended before Chief Judicial Magistrate that Maria’s custody was imperative to track down Paromita and Fernandez, who were the main conspirators and absconding. The police also stated that the probe required scrutiny of Maria’s bank accounts to ascertain how much share did each one of the four accused, who were part of the Parapan Travel Company, receive. “We also need to probe how much of this money was used by the accused, including Maria, as the money is yet to be recovered. The accused (Maria) was also accused in a crime like murder and probe is pending to ascertain if she is also wanted in any other crime apart from the fraud case registered in Vadodara.”

Maria was detained by the Ahmedabad Crime Branch Thursday morning from the Naroda residence of her lawyer Rajkumar Chaumal and handed over to the Vadodara DCB, based on the June 6 complaint of a Vadodara-based La-Raib Tours that had ordered 1,200 tickets to Haj from Susairaj’s partnership firm Parapan, based in Mumbai.