Surat cops to help Orissa police now

SURAT, July 7: The city police team which spent almost a month in Orissa, tracking down criminals who after committing crimes had fled to...

SURAT, July 7: The city police team which spent almost a month in Orissa, tracking down criminals who after committing crimes had fled to their native state, may have by and large worked on all the cases they started with.

But they still have their hands full as the team has assured their counterparts in Orissa there that they would track down criminals who after committing crimes in Orissa had fled to the most likely destination — Surat.

According to the city police, investigations had revealed that some the criminals had committed crimes both in Surat and Orissa, each time escaping for one place to the other.

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The city police will soon procure a list of the criminals from Orissa, who could possibly be in the city. “Now that the Surat and Orissa police have decided to co-ordinate, detection will be much easier,” DCP K K Ojha, who led the team to Orissa, told Express Newsline.

“Interestingly, crimes committed here by the criminals from Orissa were almost insignificant,” Ojha said, while emphasising the success of the exercise, that could well be the biggest non-terrorist operation carried out by a police force in the country.

Following a two-pronged approach, the police on one hand kept a lookout for criminals and searched for stolen vehicles on the other. The city police took into custody 18 criminals and six vehicles stolen from Surat.

Although the police could not pick up all the 86 people it wanted to arrest, it definitely tasted success to a fair extent. The team managed to trace one Laxmi Bhura Bharwad, who was kidnapped from Katargam nine years ago by three people. Bharwad, who was 15 years old then, was traced in a village of Ganjam district.

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The arrest of Jairam Sahu however was the most rewarding. Wanted in the sensational Sonal-Shilpa rape and murder case that took place in November last year, the Surat team tracked down Panch Pradhan, Jairam’s uncle, and grilled him for over six hours before he admitted that Sahu was employed in a poultry farm in Surat. This was conveyed to the city police and the police arrested him within an hour of being informed.

The team also arrested one Dilip Nayak, a dreaded criminal wanted by the city police for murder and armed loot as well as the Orissa police for a jailbreak.

The others arrested included Santosh Jani from Ganjam, Ashok Jena from Chhatrapur, Bikram Mahapatra and Sankar Mahapatra from Ganjam along with Kanu Nayak and Ravi Nayak, involved in murders and armed loots in the city.