Meow meow case: ‘Kalokhe kept changing location of mephedrone before it was seized’

The Satara police, however, in August challenged the Pune FSL’s report and wrote to the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Hyderabad to conduct a reanalysis. They have already sent them a sealed specimen of what they believe is mephedrone seized from Kalokhe’s possession.

According to a statement recorded by fellow accused Shashikala alias Baby Patankar, Kalokhe had been pressurising her to purchase large quantities of mephedrone from drug suppliers and another chargesheeted accused Gyan Samuel.

Patankar’s statement adds that in 2014, she met Samuel thrice on Pune-Satara Highway and purchased a total of five suitcases of the drug from him for
Rs 10 lakh.

At each meeting, the chargesheet adds, Kalokhe stood some distance away at a cigarette shop to observe the transaction and took the bags away in a state transport bus to Kanheri, his native village in Satara’s Khandala taluka. “When I asked him why did not travel to Kanheri in a car, he said that private cars were searched along the highway while state transport buses were not,” Patankar’s statement reads.

Later, when Patankar inquired about what he had done with the suitcases, Kalokhe had said that he had stored them in his home in Kanheri, the chargesheet states.
Early in March 2015, when the duo travelled across Maharashtra, they had stayed overnight at a hotel in Kolhapur. At that time, Kalokhe had got a call from his sister Savita Vir, who lives in village close to Kanheri, that some policemen had come to Kanheri asking for him, Patankar’s statement reveals. An enraged Kalokhe allegedly then turned on Patankar, the chargesheet notes. “He warned me that if anything happened to him, he would drag my family into it. He then called his brother-in-law Popat Vir and asked if he could move the drugs to a more secure location,” Patankar’s statement adds.

Kalokhe’s sister Savita ahs told the Satara Police in her statement that on March 9, Kalokhe called her between 7 am and 10 am, and had sought her permission to store sacks of some “chemical” at her home. Savita however, asked him to call her husband Popat Vir. When Kalokhe called Popat Vir at 10.30 am and made the same request, Vir said that he was busy in a gram panchayat meeting and would call him later.

It is then, the chargesheet alleges, that Kalokhe contacted his friend Jagannath Pawar in Kanheri. Pawar told the police that he received a call from Kalokhe at 11.30 am on March 9 when he and his wife were watering their fields. “Kalokhe told me that he wanted to store some chemicals used to make medicines in my house. I agreed and helped him pack his bags into three sacks that I used to store urea in. we put these sacks inside my house,” Pawar’s statement reads.

The chargesheet adds that Kalokhe then allegedly told Pawar that he wanted to destroy the chemicals and gave his Rs 10,000 to buy a cupboard and store the chemicals inside. “But before we could destroy the mephedrone, the police reached the house,” reads Pawar’s statement.

The near 300-page chargesheet filed at a Satara Court includes statements of 58 witnesses, of whom eight are panch witnesses. In the absence of a forensic confirmation, the police has affixed three FIR of mephedrone sale in Mumbai and Vasai in 2014 and 2015 in which Patankar is a wanted accused.