Written by: Gautam S Mengle
2 min readMumbaiNov 17, 2013 03:38 AM IST
First published on: Nov 17, 2013 at 03:38 AM IST
The city police’s crime branch,which is probing the sale in black of tickets and complimentary passes for Sachin Tendulkar’s last test match,suspects that the cafeteria of Islam Gymkhana was used as a platform to procure passes and tickets by Abdul Rehman,a member of the club who has been arrested in the case.
According to Crime Branch officials,Rehman’s brother owns a cafeteria at the Islam Gymkhana. “Rehman would hang out in the cafeteria and convince other members to hand over a couple of their tickets to him. We are verifying whether these members gave him their tickets in exchange for money or out of goodwill,” said a Crime Branch officer.
The Crime Branch is writing to the Maharashtra Cricket Association,asking for details of the six complimentary passes to find out who they were issued to and how they ultimately ended up with the arrested accused.
On Wednesday,Janak Gandhi,Girish Premnath and Ajay Jadhav were arrested while trying to sell six complimentary passes for the match for Rs 25,000 each. They were also allegedly found to be in possession of 15 other tickets.
Meanwhile,the police on Saturday questioned Bombay Gymkhana member Chintan Zaveri in connection with the racket.
The secretaries of the Bombay Gymkhana as well as the Islam Gymkhana had also come to the police,sources said.
“Interrogation of the arrested accused has revealed that the six VIP passes seized from them had been sold to Premnath by a member of Bombay Gymkhana. Premnath then sold them to Gandhi,who was negotiating a deal with a dummy customer put up by us when he was arrested,” said an officer.
All the four accused arrested so far have been remanded in police custody till November 21,the police said.
gautam.mengle@expressindia.com
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