Ghaziabad: Two persons were arrested on Tuesday morning for allegedly trying to extort Rs 40 lakh from a timber dealer.
The arrested have been identified as Pawan and Khurshid, both residents of Ghaziabad’s Loni area.
On February 3, a Loni resident Vinod Kumar Gupta, who runs Laxmi timber store in the area, had filed a police complaint of receiving an extortion call the same night where the accused had demanded Rs 40 lakh from him and threatened him with life if he didn’t pay up.
Based on the complaint, some unknown persons were booked under IPC sections 386 (extortion by putting a person in fear of death or grievous hurt) and 507 (criminal intimidation by anonymous communication).
“During the investigation, we came to know that the accused had purchased a sim card by using a fake identity card. On February 14, three accused, Diwakar, Avnish and Harun, were arrested for selling the sim card on a fake document. From them police came to know about the two people who had bought the sim card,” said O P Singh, the SHO of Loni police station.
Police then traced their phone numbers and eventually nabbed them from their houses on Tuesday morning.
“During questioning, one of the accused, Pawan, had told police that he worked as a driver at a shop adjacent to the victim’s and after he lost his job, he was left with no money for buying liquor. So, he hatched a plan along with his friend to extort money from the victim,” he added.
Both of them were produced in a district court on Tuesday that sent them to jail.