The Thane police have busted an alleged inter-State racket where vehicles were stolen from various locations in Maharashtra, stored in Pune, provided with documents from Nagaland, and sold in Karanataka and Rajasthan. Nine people have been arrested. The mastermind, Sandeep Lagoo, posing as a bank recovery agent, had even rented a shed in a Pune farmhouse as a clearing house for the stolen vehicles.
On December 10, 2018, Uddhav Sathe, a resident of Vrindavan Society in Thane, registered a complaint with the Rabodi police about the theft of his Mahindra Bolero Pickup.
“Unknown to the thieves, the vehicle had a GPS tracker, which we used to trace its movements. We also checked closed circuit television camera footage. We traced the vehicle to a farmhouse in Pune, where we picked up Mr. Lagoo,” senior police inspector Ramrao Somvanshi, Rabodi police station, said.
The police then made inquiries with the owner of the farmhouse, a farmer, who said that Mr. Lagoo had approached him around two years ago posing as a bank recovery agent.
“Mr. Lagoo told the farmer that he worked in the field of repossessing vehicles of loan defaulters and needed a space to store the vehicles. The duo entered into a legal agreement where Mr. Lagoo would pay monthly rent to the farmer in exchange for using the shed. Using the details in the agreement and based on Mr. Lagoo’s interrogation, we arrested eight more accused,” Mr. Somvanshi said.
Over the next one month, the police identified farmers in Karnataka and Rajasthan, who had bought stolen vehicles, most of them pickup trucks and SUVs used for transporting large quantities of produce, without knowing that they were stolen.
Joint Commissioner of Police Madhukar Pandey, Thane police, said, “Inquiries have revealed that the accused have stolen 105 vehicles till date: 32 vehicles from Thane city, 12 from Palghar, 4 from Pune city, 3 from Pimpri-Chinchwad, 6 from Pune rural, 8 from Raigad, 1 each from Nashik city and Ahmednagar, 14 from Navi Mumbai, 6 from Thane rural, 14 from Mumbai city, and 4 from the Gujarat police commissionerate. Of them, 80 have been recovered so far.”
Investigating officers said the accused would identify vehicles and strike in the middle of the night. “The vehicles would be driven to a garage in Pune where their engine and chassis numbers would be changed. A separate module provided paperwork like RC books registered in Nagaland, and the vehicles would then be driven to Karnataka or Rajasthan, where another module would buy them and then sell them to interested parties,” an officer, who is part of the investigation, said.
Besides Mr. Lagoo, the other accused have been identified as Javed Khan, Altaf Qureshi and Mohammed Yusuf Khan and Vinit Madhiwal from Mumbai, Altab Gokak and Sadik Mulla from Karnataka, and Mangilal Jakhad and Ramprasad Inaniya from Rajasthan. Officers said Mr. Lagoo was the mastermind of the racket and had a wide network of agents who would bring orders to him, and that those agents will be nabbed.