The Convict, Shyam Kishore Garikapatti, Who Had Jumped Parole In 2003 Was Caught At His Rented Residence In A Village Called Saligao, Situated 10-Km From Panaji
Mumbai : The Goa police, who on Saturday night caught an aide of fugitive underworld don Dawood Ibrahim and a convict in the 1993 blasts case, will be handing him over to the Mumbai police in the next two
days as their investigation is expected to be completed by then.
The convict, Shyam Kishore Garikapatti, who had jumped parole in 2003 was caught at his rented residence in a village called Saligao, situated 10-km from Panaji where he was staying for the past eight years. The Goa police, acting on certain specific inputs arrested Garikapatti and seized a 9 mm pistol and several forged IDs from him. “We found out that Garikapatti, though he had a residence here had been a frequent traveller and would stay out most of the time, visiting other countries. He seldom came to Saligao, once every month at the most,” said Superintendent of Goa Police, Karthik Kashyap.
The Goa police are interrogating him mostly for possessing the gun, having fake IDs and his activities in the past eight years. He was living with a fake identity of Govind Rao and working with a realty firm in Panaji. “We do not have much to interrogate him for. The chief crimes we have charged him with are illegal possession of the gun and the forged IDs. We should be done with the work in the next one or at the most two days and hand him over to the Mumbai police. We shall definitely keep them in the loop and pass on whatever information they might need about his activities,” Kashyap added.
Garikapatti, also known as ‘The Black Scorpion’ was a sharpshooter for the D-gang and had carried out several shootouts in Mumbai, including the one in JJ Hospital, Byculla. He, along with five other sharpshooters had gone to JJ Hospital in September 1992 to kill two members of rival gangster Arun Gawli’s gang who were responsible for killing Dawood’s brother in law, Ibrahim Parkar in January 1992.
After carrying out the shootout, Garikapatti and his accomplices, including a sharpshooter Subhash Singh Thakur, had escaped to Nepal from where they were caught in a joint operation carried out by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Mumbai police.
While he had been convicted for his involvement in the 1993 blasts under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), and jumped parole in 2003, Garikapatti also has five cases of murder and nine of extortion registered against him at various police stations in Mumbai. He is also said to have been in contact with Subhash Singh Thakur of the D-gang all this while. “We believe that he has been in constant touch with the D-gang and need to find out what he has been up to for all these years. The charges against him are very serious and he is indeed a big catch for us,” said deputy commissioner of police Dhananjay Kulkarni who is the spokesperson for Mumbai police.
