Extortion case against Iqbal Kaskar: Cops to record statements of NCP corporator, Sena leader

Mulla had earlier been arrested by the Thane police for allegedly driving builder Suraj Parmar to commit suicide, while Gharat had been booked in a case of assault. Incidentally, Gharat’s wife Namrata is the Shiv Sena corporator from Waghbilgaon area of Thane, where the complainant in the case owns a disputed parcel of land that Kaskar was allegedly interested in.

Thane Crime Branch Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) N T Kadam, the investigating officer in the case, said, “We will be calling corporator Najeeb Mulla and political party member Ravi Gharat in connection with the investigation in the Kaskar case.” An officer linked to the case said their main focus was on filing the first chargesheet against the arrested accused. “Since we filed the first chargesheet on Tuesday, we now want to focus on the names that cropped up during the interrogation of Kaskar and his aides Israr Sayyed and Mumtaz Shaikh. The names of Mulla and Gharat cropped up during their interrogation and hence we will be calling them to record their statements in light of the information provided by the accused.”

Section 160 of the Criminal Procedure Code gives the police the power to summon a witness in connection with an investigation. The officer said the summons had already been prepared. “We will issue the summons to the duo on Monday and give them two to three days to meet us to record their statements,” the officer said. A senior IPS officer said the future course of action would depend on their statements.

Mulla was incidentally one of the four corporators arrested by the Thane police last year for allegedly driving builder Suraj Parmar to commit suicide. Parmar had shot himself at his office in December 2015. Gharat has a case of assault registered against him by the railway police.

An officer who is part of the investigation said besides the four arrested accused — Kaskar, his two aides and matka operator Pankaj Gangar — and three wanted accused, Shakil Shaikh alias Chhota Shakeel and two shooters, more suspects were likely to be arrested. “Apart from what may turn out during investigation, we are also looking for some couriers with whose help the money earned through the racket was sent to other countries,” an officer said.

Apart from the chargesheet in this case which states that Kaskar and his aides forcibly took away four flats and Rs 30 lakh from a builder, the police have filed a second chargesheet running into 300 pages in the second case in which jewellery worth Rs 15 lakh had been allegedly extorted from a jeweller. The police are currently working on the third chargesheet in which underworld gangster Dawood Ibrahim has also been named as a wanted accused.