A city court on Tuesday granted the Crime Branch-CID (CB-CID) custody of four of the six bookies who were arrested for betting in the IPL tourney.
CB-CID’s petition seeking custody of the bookies for 10 days for further probe in order to arrest those who were still at large came up for hearing before Saidapet XI Metropolitan Magistrate Saravanan.
The magistrate granted police custody for four days with the condition that the accused be produced before the court before 3.30 pm on Friday and advocates be allowed to counsel the accused on Thursday.
The quartet - Virudachalam alias Vedachalam of RA Puram, Lucky alias Narpath of Purasaiwakam, Praveen Kumar alias Pappu Gowtham of Sowcarpet and Deepak Bajaj of Kilpauk - was then moved to a secluded place for further interrogation. They have applied for bail, which will come up for hearing on Thursday.
Later in the night, prime accused Prashant Mansukhlal Pawn was produced before the magistrate, who remanded him in judicial custody till June 4.
The search in the residences of Kitti and Sanjay Bafna led to the seizure of Rs 3.3 lakh and 10 cheques issued in favour of Kitti each for Rs 5 lakh, 12 sim cards, a mobile phone and incriminating documents from the former’s house. The cops were able to find the betting ledger maintained during a match. The ledger was a sheet having two columns - each column assigned to a team playing that match to record the betting amount with the customer’s name. Cops are looking for such ledgers as it would be easy to tally the entire amount of money.
The search at Prashant’s apartment, valued at about Rs 4 crore, led to seizure of about Rs 10 lakh.