BENGALURU: Notorious fugitive underworld don Ravi Pujari has been extradited and brought to Bengaluru from Paris around midnight on Monday by a special team of Karnataka police, headed by Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Amar Kumar Pandey. A former close aide of India’s most wanted fugitive criminal and mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, Dawood Ibrahim, Pujari was brought to Bengaluru under tight police security by Air France flight AF 194, which landed at the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) at 12.38 am on Monday.
He was taken to an undisclosed high-security location by the police and will be produced before a local court on Monday. He will be taken for medical examination under a thick security blanket. Top police sources told TNIE that Pandey and his team arrested Pujari on February 22 from the Republic of Senegal. Pujari, against whom multiple Red Corner Notices (RCNs) were issued by Interpol, was arrested from a barber shop in Dakar in Senegal on January 21 by the local police with the help a ‘vital’ tip-off from Pandey, who was then posted as ADGP, State Human Rights Commission.
Pujari had jumped bail last year and escaped from Senegal. According to the sources, he was arrested recently on a tip-off from the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW).Soon after his arrest last year in Senegal, Pujari’s lawyers had argued that their client was Anthony Fernandez from Burkina Faso, as mentioned in his passport issued on July 10, 2013 and valid till July 8, 2023, and that he was not the fugitive don that the Government of India was looking for.
Cong leaders had got threat calls from Pujari
“But the ghost of a 1994 murder of a builder in Mumbai, in which Pujari was arrested and later enlarged on bail, reportedly got him in,” said an official source.“Soon after being released on bail, Pujari fled to South Africa before moving to Dubai, Australia and back to West Africa. The Maharashtra police had approached the Interpol for a Red Corner Notice (RCN) against him. The RCN was issued, and it contained Pujari’s fingerprint, which was collected at the time when he was in a Mumbai prison. When Pujari was identified in Senegal in January 2019, his fingerprints matched with the one in the RCN,” said the officer.
The 50-year-old don, originally from Malpe in coastal Karnataka, who had been on the run for more than two decades, has been charge-sheeted in several criminal cases under sections of the Indian Penal Code for extortion (384), kidnapping for ransom (364), murder (302) and criminal intimidation (506) among others in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Kerala. There are 98 criminal cases registered against Pujari in Karnataka alone. Of these, at least 46 are registered in Bengaluru.
Pujari was charge-sheeted for his alleged involvement in a fatal shootout against builder Subbaraju in 2001 in Bengaluru. In February 2007, at his behest, an assailant walked into the office of Shabnam Developers in Jayanagar and shot down the office receptionist, mistaking him for Shabnam owner K Samiulla. There are more cases of extortion and shootouts at prominent builders and realtors allegedly by henchmen linked to Pujari in Bengaluru, Mangaluru and Udupi.
Congress MP from Bengaluru Rural D K Suresh, Congress MLA Tanveer Sait and Kerala opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala have claimed that they had received threat calls from the gangster. Karnataka police had sent a comprehensive dossier to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) of over 15 criminal cases, translated in French, in which Pujari has been charge-sheeted but not faced trial. The Maharashtra, Gujarat and Kerala police had also sent files of charge-sheeted cases against him to the MHA.
The files were further submitted to the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), which had sent the police dossiers to Senegal, where they were processed by the Justice Department.“The process of Pujari’s extradition took some months as India does not have an extradition treaty with Senegal. But the extradition of the fugitive don was drawn out between the two-member countries under the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime (UNODC),” the source added.
Second big catch for state
Ravi Pujari’s extradition is the second important case in Karnataka in the last five years. In August 2015, don Bannanje Raja was extradited from Casablanca in Morocco in an alleged fake passport case. There was a Red Corner Notice (RCN) against him.