ACP (Traffic) Sanket Kaushik
An exhaustive probe during which police scanned footage from 40 CCTVs and examined over 100 tempos helped them catch the driver of a vehicle which allegedly ran over a 58-year-old Assistant Commissioner of Police last week.
The accused, Amit Pulami (28), hails from Nepal and had come to Delhi a year ago. He lives with his wife and two children, and works at a warehouse in Gurgaon. He was arrested from Southwest Delhi’s Mahipalpur.
On July 25, ACP (Traffic) Sanket Kaushik was hit by the speeding tempo on the service lane near Rajokri flyover, where he was managing traffic. The FIR said the accused driver stopped for a moment and looked back at Kaushik’s driver, who was chasing him, before fleeing the spot.
As its number plate was covered with mud, the vehicle could not be identified by eyewitnesses.
After six days, police arrested Pulami, who was delivering a consignment to IGI airport when the incident took place. “It appears he didn’t know he had killed someone. When the ACP’s driver tried to stop him, he got scared and went to IGI, gave his consignment and stayed there overnight. The next day, when he saw the news about the accident, he went to a repair shop and got the tempo fixed. He didn’t drive it for the next five days and was hiding at his home in Rangpuri,” said a senior officer.
DCP (Southwest) Devender Arya said, “We recovered a piece of iron from the vehicle and found it was from a tempo. To identify the vehicle and ascertain the time of the incident, our teams initially checked over 15 CCTV cameras. The incident took place at 7.48 pm and a brown tempo was seen.”
CCTV footage from the MCD toll tax booth at Delhi-Haryana border and NH-8 were recovered and over 50 tempos were examined by police. “We also checked cargo records of IGI airport to see if the accused went there. We found 52 tempos in the records and examined them all,” said police
Senior police officers said that eventually, after scanning over 40 CCTV cameras in the city and examining over 100 tempos, police found the accused had come from Gurgaon. “We backtracked the CCTV footage from the spot. We found that the tempo had come from a warehouse in Gurgaon. We spoke to the warehouse owner there, who helped us identify the accused,” police said.