2 in custody for extortion bid

Times of India: Nasik: Monday, September 12, 2016.

A city court has remanded two suspects involved in an extortion bid in police custody till Wednesday. The accused were arrested by the crime branch of the unit III of the police on Friday afternoon for threatening a person of murder. They had demanded Rs 50 lakh from the victim.

Ganeswaman Kankal (38), a resident of Radha Niwas, Pathardi, and his associate Prashant Madhukar Alai, owner of a photocopy shop and a cyber cafe in Indiranagar, were arrested for threatening Ramchandra Bhagwat, a resident of Vrindavan Colony, behind Hotel Kamat on the Nashik-Pune Road, the police said.

Kankal, who used to move about as an RTI activist, and Alai (33), a resident of Swami Heights, near RTO, Peth Road, were threatening Bhagwat to defame and murder him under the Right to Information (RTI) Act as Bhagwat had set up the Ujwalam Agro Multi-state Society in the Govindnagar.

The duo had demanded Rs 50 lakh from Bhagwat and threatened to kill him if he did not pay up. Subsequently, Bhagwat approached the police commissioner Ravindra Singhal and reported the matter to him.

CP Singhal handed over the case to the unit three of the crime branch. Meanwhile, Bhagwat initiated talks with the suspects and agreed to pay Rs 3 lakh to them. Later, he told them that he had only Rs 2 lakh with him.

The police decided that Bhagwat would hand over the extortion money at Alai's shop. On Friday afternoon, senior police inspector Narayan Nyahalde and his team laid a trap near the shop and arrested the duo red-handed while accepting the money from the victim.

While searching Alai's shop, the police found two country-made pistols and 30 rounds of fire. The police also confiscated two mobile phones and two motorcycles owned by the accused.

CP Singhal said they were taking efforts to detect such crimes on an urgent basis as the victims in such cases constantly lived under threat.

In another extortion case, the police on September 5 Shejwal and Bhausaheb Munde, residents of Madsangvi, who were demanding Rs 1 crore from Sandeep Jadhav, who, along with his father Raghunath Jadhav (known as Farshiwale Baba) ran a trust in the name of Devbappa Maruti near Trimbakeshwar. The duo was threatening to expose Jadhav through RTI.