Mumbai: A sessions court recently sentenced four people to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment in a 2016 gold heist case which has a strange resemblance to the first recorded crime of fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim in 1979.
In both cases, the crime scene was near Carnac Bunder Bridge, and the victims were travelling in a car when they were looted. In the 1979 case, Dawood was arrested after he and his associates waylaid a vehicle and snatched away Rs 5 lakh.
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This marked his entry into the world of crime, a police officer said.
In the present case, on Sep 17, 2016, when jeweller Mukesh Sanghvi and his colleagues were on their way to Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) in a taxi, the driver, Shahnawaz Khan, pulled over near Carnac Bridge, citing an urgent need to relieve himself. Within seconds, four men surrounded the vehicle, brandishing weapons and threatening Sanghvi with dire consequences if he resisted. Before the jeweller could react, his bags containing 6.56 kg of gold jewellery worth Rs 1.87 crore were taken away and the gang melted into the bylanes of south Mumbai.
Police officers who probed the 2016 case recalled the then city police commissioner Datta Padsalgikar drawing parallels between the two cases. In the 1979 case, the Mumbai Crime Branch’s Unit 2 cracked the case within a month, acting on a crucial tip-off from constable Hriday Mishra. Dawood was arrested by the Pydhonie police and later he jumped bail.
Additional sessions judge V. M. Sundale also imposed a fine on the convicts — Praful Gaikwad, Shahnawaz alias Shanu Badruddin Khan, Jahangir Abdul Shaikh, and Ratankumar Shamnath Singh. They were fined Rs 10,000 and Rs 5,000, failing which they would face an additional three months of simple imprisonment. Gaikwad was arrested while attempting to sell his share of the stolen gold in Bangalore. His interrogation led to the arrest of others. Police recovered stolen gold worth Rs 45 lakh.
