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Journalism of Courage
It was a tattoo in Marathi that helped the RAK Marg police in Mumbai trace and arrest a 36-year-old man, a proclaimed offender who had been ‘missing’ for more than 10 years. In December 2022, Vinod Jugalkishore Vaishnav was eventually located in a Navi Mumbai jail, where he had been lodged since 2016.
According to the police, Vaishnav had been committing crimes like thefts and robberies for 15 years. Yet they had a tough time tracing him after he went absconding, mainly because of his name. “Every time he got arrested, he would change his middle name. At some police stations, he said his middle name was Jugalkishor while in others it was mentioned as only Kishor. This created confusion due to which we could not trace him because as per protocol, we check police and jail records to see if the person we are looking for has been arrested by another police station or lodged in any jail,” an officer privy to the investigation said.
The police said that Vaishnav was booked in 13 cases after he committed thefts in the Dadar, Byculla and Vikhroli areas. He was arrested by the RAK Marg police in 2009 for stealing a motorcycle from Sewri and committing a robbery on that stolen bike. Once he got bail in this case in 2010, however, he stopped attending court hearings. Subsequently, the metropolitan magistrate court in Dadar declared him a proclaimed offender.
“Vinod originally hails from Nagpur and as per the records available with us, he stayed on the footpath at Jamburi Maidan in Worli,” said Assistant Police Inspector Mahesh Lamkhede of RAK Marg police station.
“We did not have any clue about him; we did not even have his picture. On the basis of our previous records, we knew that his name is Vinod Jugalkishore Vaishnav, his address is Jamburi Maidan footpath in Worli and he has a tattoo on his hand that read ‘Vinod-Vaishali’ in Marathi,” said an officer.
Police officials initially went to Worli, and later to Nagpur and Titwala. Later, the police team learnt that one of his female friends had learnt about his arrest in a theft case. A team was sent to her address in Andheri’s Saki Naka. The woman told the police that Vaishnav had been arrested for committing dacoity by the NRI police in Navi Mumbai. She also informed them that he had been booked under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) and was in Taloja jail since 2016.
“We immediately rushed to jail but we struggled to locate him as his name was different in the jail records,” said an officer, adding, “We then called the person named Vinod Kishor Vaishnav based on suspicion and found a tattoo on his hand. It was similar to what was described in our records. Accordingly, he was summoned and arrested on December 15, 2022.”
He was then produced before the court and remanded in judicial custody, the police said.
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