The city police on Wednesday stumbled upon a racket that allegedly tampered with the vehicle chassis and engine numbers and procured valid registration documents with the help of Regional Transport Authorities. Police seized 14 registration certificates for non-existent vehicles and nabbed five persons.
Police said the accused purchased condemned defence and police bikes in auctions or through a middleman. These vehicles bear no chassis/engine numbers, so they created new arbitrary numbers and sold in the open market. They used to buy vehicles even from online site OLX.
Seventeen such bikes including 15 Royal Enfield 350 CC bikes belonging to Defence and Delhi Police (1960 to 1980 models), impression tools, and 25 RCs were seized from their possession.
The accused were identified as U. Hitesh Patel (32), a motorcycle broker; Michael Modi (45), a bike mechanic; A. Vittal Rao (49), RTA agent; Hakeem Abu Naser (30), and Mohammed Arif (26), both bike mechanics.
The whole issue came to light when a person bought vehicle from the accused and went to their garage to fetch the Registration Certificate. He found another vehicle parked there with the same Registration Number.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Task Force), P. Radha Kishan Rao said for the past three years the accused were involved in the offence and Patel used to procure the scrap bikes for between ₹28,000 and ₹35,000 without documents. While Rao, who is an RTA agent for the past three decades, managed to get the original registration certificate for the condemned vehicle by colluding with transport officials and paying them hefty commissions.
“Rao used to charge ₹20,000 from Patel and give huge money to the officials in Bandlaguda RTO to get the work done without any physical verification of the vehicle and other documents,” he said.
Rao used to engage couple of bike mechanics in the area for ₹1,000 to get themselves clicked as the owner of the vehicle in RTO for registration.
Modi helped Patel for re-modelling the bike and sell them to general public for more than ₹70,000.
Interestingly, the police also seized a list consisting of 72 old Royal Enfield bikes from across the country. The accused along with the seized bikes were handed-over to Gandhi Nagar police for further investigation.
