The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) that filed a charge sheet on Thursday in an extortion case filed at Marine Drive police station by a developer last year, has named suspended former city police chief Param Bir Singh as a suspect in the case.
In Dec last year, the apex court had restrained the Mumbai police from filing any more charge sheets in the FIR’s against Singh, while permitting the probes to continue.
Singh was named as an accused by the complainant Shyam Sunder Agarwal among other high ranking police officials - one of the DCP rank, two of ACP level, two police inspectors and two private persons. The charge sheet filed on Thursday has named the private individuals - Sanjay Punamiya and Sunil Jain and the two police inspectors - Nandkumar Gopale and Asha Korke, both of whom are currently in custody in the case.
Apart from Singh, the police have named as suspects DCP Akbar Pathan and ACP’s Sanjay Patil and Siddharth Shinde, who had been named as accused in the FIR. Prosecutor Shekhar Jagtap said the investigation is in progress against them as the reason for the charge sheet not being filed against them. For Singh, the charge sheet has additionally mentioned the Supreme Court’s protection order to him of November last year in which the apex court stated that he could join the investigation and he should not be arrested and has extended the interim protection from time to time.
The complainant - a Bhayander-based builder - had made the complaint against his former estranged business partner Sanjay Punamiya, Sunil Jain and the police officials. Punamiya, the builder had complained, had filed as many as 18 false cases against him after their business relations soured and had alleged that in one of the cases lodged at Juhu police station, he was extorted with the threat of arrest with the help of senior police officials. Agarwal said the police officials had connived with Punamiya in the extortion.
The charge sheet contains 72 witness statements, including many of the police staff of the Juhu police station. A statement that forms a part of the charge sheet is of senior police inspector of Juhu police station Shashikant Mane who said he had instructed his station staff to keep the case details of the extortion case filed by Punamiya confidential. This was on the instruction, he said, of DCP Abhishek Trimukhe who had purportedly told him on a phone call to keep these confidential as they pertained to extortion and a leak of information could affect the probe.
The crime branch has recorded Trimukhe’s statement too, in which he states that he had given such instruction as he got a phone call from DCP Akbar Pathan that the case details must remain confidential at the end of the police station. To a question on whether Trimukhe knows Punamiya, Trimukhe says in his statement, that around 2017, when he was working as a DCP in the Thane Commissionerate, Singh, who was then the Thane police commissioner, had introduced him to Punamiya at his office. He shared an ordinary acquaintance with Punamiya, he states.
Punamiya, the complainant has alleged, would frequently allude to his close contact with Singh to extort Agarwal with the threat of arrest under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA) in the cases against him.
