Mumbai: The Dindoshi Sessions Court has sentenced Chintan Upadhyay to life imprisonment in the Hema Upadhyay-Haresh Bhambani murder case, but Vidyadhar Rajbhar, one of the conspirators, is still at large.
Police sources said that Vidyadhar’s last location was near the Bangladesh border in Tripura, and it was suspected that he had escaped to the neighbouring country.
Vidyadhar made and sold fibre glass in Mumbai. On December 13, 2015, bodies of two people were found wrapped in plastic in a drain in Kandivali. By the time the police named Vidyadhar as suspect, he had absconded, an official said. Since then he has never got in touch with his wife or mother, the official said.
Vidyadhar had three mobile phones, which he switched on from time to time, the official said. At various times these phones were tracked to locations in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura, he said.
Tea garden worker using Vidyadhar’s phone in Kerala
The police, in fact, dispatched a team to Kerala after one of the phones was tracked there. Upon reaching the location, officials found that a tea garden worker was using Vidyadhar’s phone. He told the police that he had bought the phone from a market around 10-15 kilometres away.
When the officials went to the market, the shopkeeper told them that a man had sold the phone to him 20-25 days earlier.
Suspecting that Vidyadhar was working in the tea garden, the officials kept a watch for 10-12 days and kept an eye on the labourers. Vidyadhar, however, did not come.
One phone was traced to Tripura
One phone was traced to Tripura, so the team went there. The person in whose name the SIM card was inserted in Vidyadhar’s phone was the sarpanch of that place. He told the officials the phone was with a labourer working on railway tracks.
The worker had bought the mobile from a shopkeeper. Since he did not have any documents, the shopkeeper sold him the SIM card by taking money against someone else’s papers.
The official said that the Bangladesh border was not far from the location.
