The weapons used to fire at Salman Khan’s Galaxy Apartment residence were recovered as a result of using a highly technological method which was used in the Sadichha Sane case. The team that was originally formed to investigate the Sane murder case last year was again utilised in this instance to recover the weapons from one and a half metre below the river bed.
After arresting both the accused in Salman Khan firing case, Mumbai police had a massive hurdle to find out the weapons used for firing at his residence. After the investigation revealed that the accused had thrown away the guns, magazines and cartridges in the Tapi river near Surat, the Crime Branch team of Mumbai Police made several unsuccessful attempts to locate the weapons with the help of divers.
Crime Branch Team With Recovered Weapon |
Successful Retrieval Of Weapons From Tapi River
It was believed that the gun and bullets might have been swept away with the flow of the river, which may take a few more days to find. Amid this challenging situation, senior crime branch officials, including investigating officer Daya Nayak decided to assemble and use the same team that had previously investigated the Sadichha Sane murder case of 2021 to recover evidence from beneath the seabed in Bandra. The team utilised the same resources and expertise including officers, assistant police inspectors Utkarsh Vaze and Mahendra Patil along with the diver Vishnukant to successfully retrieve the weapons from the Tapi River.
Recovering Guns Linked To Khan's Residence Firing
This team had drawn on their invaluable experience and expertise garnered from their prior investigation of the tragic murder of Sadikcha Sane, a promising MBBS student, who went missing from Bandra Bandstand in 2021. Shockingly, it was later revealed that she was murdered by a lifeguard Mithu Singh and his accomplice Abdul Jabbar, who callously disposed-off her body in the sea. When the case was handed over to the crime branch two years later, the team launched a major operation under the sea using sound navigation and ranging technology to recover crucial evidence from below the sea bed.
As the pistols were also a crucial piece of evidence in the recent case of firing at Khan’s residence, senior officials decided to go back in time and use the same old team and technology used in Sane’s case. Nayak completed the necessary paperwork with the Surat Municipal Corporation to facilitate this operation and engaged a Dubai-based salvage company known for their expertise in identifying objects in riverbeds using Hii-Tech Norwegian equipment. The salvage company utilised SONAR technology, enabling them to locate metal objects buried deep within the river bed. According to the findings of the technology, the two pistols were buried nearly one and a half metres below the river bed. Similarly, the gun's magazine and bullets had also sunk beneath the sand layer with no signs on the river's underwater surface.
Advanced Operation Recovers Guns And Ammunition From Tapi Riverbed
The officers believe that the guns, weighing 800 grams each, had remained on the riverbed for some time, but a layer of sand kept piling up on them, pushing them deeper into the ground below the river surface. Vishnu Kant,the same diver who found evidence in Sane’s case from below the sea bed near Bandra Bandstand, then dived till the bottom of the Tapi river and meticulously removed the sand layer-by-layer using an arm fixed on a floating platform, ensuring that only the sand covering the weapon was removed to avoid damaging any potential evidence.
With such an advanced and well-planned operation, the crime branch recovered both the two pistols, four magazines and 17 bullets from the river.
