Mumbai: Former city police commissioner Param Bir Singh appeared as a witness on Monday in a case concerning extortion of IAS officer Radheshyam Mopalwar in which he had granted sanction to invoke MCOCA against the accused.
Former gangster Ravi Pujari, real estate broker Satish Mangle and his wife Shraddha Mangle are facing charges of extorting the officer of Rs. 7 crores. Singh, who was Thane police commissioner in 2018, was then the sanctioning authority for invoking the stringent act.
Singh told the court in his deposition that he had not found out if the investigating officer had traced the location of calls of Ravi Pujari and said that as a sanctioning authority it was not his job to find the same. It was suggested to Singh that he had implicated Mangle along with Pradeep Sharma, who was investigating the case, to help Mopalwar escape fraud charges. Singh denied the same.
He said that it is true that there are no other cases against the Mangle couple with Ravi Pujari except the present one. It was also suggested to him that he had hatched a conspiracy along with Sharma and Pujari, which he denied. He said it is true that an offence was registered against him in Thane in which Pujari is his co-accused. Singh said that the case has now been transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation and is under investigation.
