Ravi Pujari to be brought back today
The gangster has been named in at least 200 cases across the country, was held in Senegal
MUMBAI/BENGALURU: Gangster Ravi Pujari, a wanted accused in 51 cases in Mumbai including murder, extortion and shootouts over the past 24 years, will be brought to India from South Africa on Monday.
Pujari has been named in at least 200 cases across the country. He was arrested in Senegal in West Africa in January 2019. He jumped bail and fled to South Africa, where he was involved in a drug trafficking and extortion racket.
According to Indian intelligence officials, Pujari had assumed the identity of Anthony Fernandes in a remote South African village and held a Burkina Faso passport.
On a tip-off from India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, a Senegal police team flew to South Africa last week and caught the 52-year-old gangster. He was being brought to the country by a team of officials, including senior Indian Police Service officers from his home state of Karnataka, where he is wanted in 79 cases.
“[We are] coming with him [Pujari] from Senegal. Now in Paris. [We are] coming by Air France and [would be] there [in India] by midnight,” a police official, who is part of the team, told PTI.
The National Investigation Agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Research and Analysis Wing would join the investigation, officials said.
A Karnataka police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, “He [Pujari] is being brought to the country even as we speak and is likely to land in the early hours of Monday. Teams involving ADGP [additional director general of police] Amar Kumar Pandey and joint commissioner of police Sandeep Patil are involved in the mission, apart from a few department officials from Mangaluru who have tracked him and his family for years.”
Officials said extraordinary precautions were being taken, given his record.
“We want to keep this quiet till he is on our soil,” the police officer cited above said. After his arrest in Senegal, the Mumbai crime branch’s anti-extortion cell (AEC) compiled a dossier with details of 20 cases against him in the city for his extradition. “The selected cases were mostly registered under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Act,” said an AEC official.
“All case papers were written in Marathi and were translated in English, which took at least two months. Apart from the documents, we collected biometric proof, including DNA samples collected from his family.”
The crime branch then handed over the compiled documents to the additional chief secretary (home), who sent them to Union home ministry to start the extradition process.
A Mumbai crime branch officer said the police in Karnataka, Kerala, and Gujarat have also prepared similar dossiers, which were submitted to the ministry that sent them to the authorities in Senegal.
In the mid-1990s, Pujari rose to notoriety, after three of his aides shot dead Om Prakash Kukreja of Kukreja builders in his office at Chembur.
He then allegedly escaped to South Africa in 1994, following the shootout at Kukreja’s Chembur office.