Mumbai: The sessions court has granted bail to a 42-year-old man from Delhi in a case of cheating a Vile Parle-based couple of Rs2.83 lakh as the investigating officer in the case didn’t turn up for the bail hearing.
The accused, Sartaj Khan, was arrested on April 27 for posing as complainant Deepak Shah’s US-based brother, Sanjay Shah, and inducing the couple to transfer the money to a bank account. Khan is said to have held 100 bogus bank accounts.
On March 21, Khan called Deepak’s wife Rita, posing as Sanjay, and pretended to be in a poor connectivity area. On this pretext, he lured Rita to chat and said that he needed to pay someone in India but was unable to transfer money. With Sanjay’s display photo in the chatting icon, the couple fell for the ruse and transferred the money. Deepak realised the fraud only when he sent screenshots of the transfer to his brother, who said he had never called.
Khan applied for bail through his lawyers Pankaj More and Nitin Kamble, and said he is nowhere connected with the crime. The prosecution, however, claimed that the probe revealed that he is the prime accused and had opened nearly 100 bank accounts in the last three months.
The court, however, granted bail with stringent conditions as the investigating officer failed to appear for the hearing. It also noted that the reply filed by the officer was also casual and deprecated his conduct.
