Duo booked for brandishing toy gun

The Charkop Police arrested two young men for threatening a 20-year-old biker with a toy gun on Kartikeshwar Road near Kandivli (W) on Monday evening.

The police said the accused duo, Amit Chavan (21) and Viraj Chavan (23), who are first cousins, were driving home in their car when the incident occurred around 7 pm.

The complainant, riding ahead of them, was returning from his tuition classes. The Chavan cousins were incessantly honking, so that they could overtake the complainant; but when he did not oblige they abused him for poor road etiquette.

Initially the youth ignored the cousins. But at the next traffic signal Amit and Viraj abused the complainant yet again and chided him for being a bad rider. This time, however, the young complainant retorted, asking Amit if he was driving in an inebriated state, which infuriated the cousins. The duo followed the youth to his building in Charkop and waited outside the gate.

The police said that 30 minutes later when the youth came emerged from the building, the Chavan cousins were waiting with the toy gun concealed in the rear. When the youth walked past, the duo whipped out the toy gun and threatened to fix him.

Panic-stricken, the youth called out to his friends for help. The locals rose to the occasion and beat up the duo and called the police control room. When the police arrived, they arrested Amit and Viraj, and seized the gun, only to find that it was a toy.

Nonetheless, the Chavan cousins were arrested and booked under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code for criminal intimidation (Section 506(2)) and intentional insult (Section 504), along with relevant sections of the Motor Vehicles Act for drunken driving. They were produced in a local magistrate’s court on Tuesday and granted bail on surety of Rs 15,000 each.