Rajkot: In a major breakthrough for Jamnagar police, notorious gangster and land mafia Jaysukh Ranpariya alias Jayesh Patel was caught in London after being on the run for nearly three years while three contract killers he had hired to eliminate prominent advocate Kirit Joshi were nabbed from Kolkata.
The local crime branch (LCB) sleuths caught the shooters Hardik Thakkar, Dilip Thakkar and Jayant Gadhvi, who had allegedly killed Joshi outside his office in full public view on April 28, 2018.
After killing Joshi, the three had moved around nearly 26 states and visited foreign countries too. Hardik had stabbed Joshi while Dilip and Jayant were waiting with a bike nearby to escape. According to police, Ranpariya had paid them Rs 2 crore for executing the murder.
According to police, they first fled to Rajasthan, thereafter to Uttar Pradesh and later reached India-Nepal border on motorcycles where they entered that country, abandoning the bike at the UP border. From Nepal they even went to Bhutan.
Deepan Bhadran, superintendent of police, Jamnagar, said, “They came back to India after a few months moving around religious places as tourists. They stayed in small hotels which skip the mandatory identity cards of tourists. Jayesh was sending them Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per month.”
Dilip and Hardik were lodged in Sabarmati Central Jail in a murder case and they met Jayesh there. They both jumped parole in 2017.
While on the run, Jayesh helped them make bogus passports from Nashik with false identity, showing them as residents of Maharashtra. They went to Thailand and then to Dakar in Senegal. When they reached Dakar, lockdown was announced and they got stuck there.
When the lockdown relaxed and international flights resumed, Dilip came to Kolkata early this year and before the two others also reached there a few days ago.
Bhadran had received specific information about their presence in Kolkata and sent a team to nab them.