Court remands extradited gangster in police custody

A Karnataka court yesterday remanded fugitive gangster Ravi Pujari in 14-day police custody for investigation into several criminal cases after he was extradited from Senegal earlier in the day, police said.
“First Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate V Jagadish remanded Pujari in 14-day police custody till March 7 for interrogation and investigation into the criminal cases filed against him over the years,” Karnataka Additional Director General of Police A K Pandey told IANS.
A 4-member Karnataka police team led by Pandey brought the 52-year-old underworld don to Bengaluru from Dakar in Senegal via Paris on an Air France flight in the early hours and kept him at an interrogation centre in Bengaluru’s south-east suburb.
“Pujari was produced before the first additional city metropolitan magistrate after a medical check-up at a state-run hospital showed him in good health for custodial interrogation till March 7,” said Pandey.
Besides Pandey, Bengaluru Joint Commissioner of Police Sandeep Patil, a sub-inspector and a constable went to Senegal last week to extradite Pujari after the West African country’s Supreme Court rejected his plea against sending him back to India.
According to the police, Pujari was nabbed from a barber shop in Senegal with the help of three busloads of heavily armed police. He had assumed a fake identity of ‘Anthony Fernandes’ and acquired Burkina Faso passports for himself, wife Padma and their three children.
Earlier, after he fled from Burkina Faso, authorities lost track till he reappeared in Dakar in Senegal. Thereafter, the Indian authorities got cracking on ‘Operation Ravi Pujari’.
“Pujari had jumped bail in Senegal last year and escaped to South Africa and got involved in big-time trafficking and extortion,” Pandey said.
The officer also clarified that Pujari was not hiding in a South Africa village as reported but in a Senegal jail pending extradition to India.
“As Pujari is fit, the investigation team will quiz him from tomorrow at a high-security place to establish his involvement in several cases,” added Pandey.
Pujari, who parted ways with underworld don Chhota Rajan, was wanted in over 200 cases of heinous crimes.
Of them, 39 are in Bengaluru, 36 in Mangaluru, 11 in Udupi and one each in Mysuru, Hubballi-Dharwad, Kolar and Shivamogga in Malnad.
The other cases are in Mumbai (49) and in Gujarat (75) pertaining to extortion, kidnapping, ransom demand and murder threats.
Pujari also extorted huge amounts from popular Bollywood stars and realtors. He was also involved in an attempt to murder case, aimed at killing a prominent lawyer of Mumbai.
For running his extortion business since 2001, he employed a gang of sharpshooters to target victims either to scare them or kill them, forcing them to pay up out of sheer fear.
To avoid detection, Pujari would use VOIP/Skype to make extortion calls/threats to his victims referred to by his contacts in India and many such victims were killed in Bengaluru and Mangaluru.