New Delhi: Radhika Jewellers in Gujarat’s Gandhidham town had some guests on Monday around 11 am. A group of four people entered the jewellery shop posing as an Enforcement Directorate (ED) team. They asked the jewellery shop owner and his staff to surrender their mobile phones and conducted an ED “raid”.
The team claimed “inputs” about unauthorised cash and jewellery in the shop, and the leader showed an identification card of an ED officer. The ED hologram on it convinced shop owner Kanhaiya Lal and his staff that the “officers” were from the federal agency. The “raid” went smoothly, and in the end, the team assured Lal and his son that contrary to the “inputs”, it could find anything.
However, hours after the “officers” left, it was discovered that gold worth Rs 25 lakh was missing from the shop. When Lal and his staff realised the “ED team” did not leave any seizure memo, it dawned upon them that the case may be one of fraud, with a script similar to that of the movie Special 26.
What unfolded next diverges from the Bollywood movie. Lal approached the local police, who quickly identified one of the accused from pictures captured by Lal’s son during further “raids” of the houses of the shop owner and his family members.
On Thursday, the Kutch East district police arrested 12 of the gang that posed as an ED team to loot gold worth Rs 25 lakh from Radhika Jewellers. The ID used in the fraud was the edited version of an ED officer’s identification leaked online.
The arrests come a month after the Delhi Police booked seven of another gang on charges of impersonating ED officers and attempting to extort nearly Rs 5 crore from a Delhi businessman. The police busted the Delhi gang after a tip-off about some officers taking him to a bank, where he was supposed to withdraw an amount to pay them a bribe.
The idea
The plot to loot Radhika Jewellers was developed by two friends, Bharat Shantilal Morvadiya and Devayat Basu Khachhar, investigators told ThePrint.
Bharat, a Class VII pass from Banaskantha district, is a goldsmith in Gandhidham, taking contracts from jewellers. He frequently visited Narayan Jewellers, situated near Radhika Jewellers. With acquaintances in the business, he was aware of Income Tax raids at Radhika Jewellers six years ago.
He shared this information with Devayat, a Botad district resident working in Gandhidham for roughly 12 years. “They have known each other for four to five years and share a good bond. Bharat’s input and knowledge about IT raids against Radhika Jewellers and Devayat’s background in finance formed the basis of the plot,” an investigator said.
Armed with the information shared by Bharat, Devayat allegedly approached his friend, Abdulsattar Ishaq Manjethi, who has cases of murder and attempted murder against him, with the idea of “raiding” Radhika Jewellers as ED officers.
However, there was one problem—people in Gandhidham knew all three of them.
Planning to bring people from outside to carry out the “raid”, Abdulsattar allegedly approached his friends, Hitesh Thakkar and Vinod Chudasama, asking them to pose as ED officers. Chudasama further roped in Ashish Mishra, Ajay Dubey, Amit Mehta, and his wife, Nisha Mehta, investigators said.
Devayat allegedly roped in another “outsider”, Shailendra Desai, a translator in the office of the divisional railway manager (DRM) in the Western Railway (WR) in Ahmedabad, to lead the “raid” of Radhika Jewellers.
Nearly 15 days before the “raid”, all 13 accused all met at a tea stall near the bus station in Gandhidham to finalise the plan, investigators said.
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D-day
According to the invesigators, Under the leadership of Shailendra Desai, five people assembled to execute the plan on Monday.
To foolproof the plan, Desai allegedly wanted to make an ID that would look genuine. “On Google, he found the ID card of Ankit Tiwari, an ED officer who was arrested in Tamil Nadu on bribery charges. Desai used editing software on it to make an ID card with his picture to impersonate ED officers,” another officer said.
The five-member team reached Radhika Jewellers and seized phones and DVR of the CCTV installed in the shop, claiming the same was part of the ED raid protocols. Devayat and Bharat “oversaw the raid”.
Failing to find anything substantial at the shop, the team took the shop owner to his cousin’s and brother’s houses. Other members of the gang posing as ED officers reached there as well. Nisha Mehta reached the shop owner’s house as a woman officer to make it all look genuine.
Then, Desai and the others allegedly told Kanhaiya Lal that they could not find anything and left, with a casual apology.
However, the matter took another turn when Lal and his staff tallied their stock and found Rs 25 lakh worth of gold missing, prompting them to approach Kutch (East) Superintendent of Police Sagar Bagmar.
“Absence of any seizure memo, given after seizure during any search, and the missing quantities of gold were big red flags that the jewellery shop owner could not overlook,” another investigator said.
Investigators said Kanhaiya Lal’s son managed to click a picture of Abdulsattar during the raids of the houses of shop owner and his family members. From that picture, the police identified Abdulsattar as he is a known local criminal, leading to the arrests of the other fraudsters.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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