Rajkot: The noose around notorious criminal, Jaysukh Ranpariya alias Jayesh Patel, who was arrested in London, was tightened so systematically that the end of his 10 year terror reign had become imminent.
The Jamnagar police with the help of UK law enforcement agency first stopped Patel’s extortion income, which left him financially distressed. This also forced the three contract killers, whom he had hired to eliminate advocate Kirit Joshi in 2018, return to India and they were arrested in Kolkata by the Jamnagar local crime branch.
Patel used to send them Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh as expenses while being on the run every month through hawala channels. The killers, Hardik Thakkar, Dilip Thakkar and Jayant Gadhvi, were caught few days ago. In fact, when they left Senegal where they had fled and got stranded due to lockdown, they had only enough money to buy flight tickets to India, said police.
The team led by Jamnagar superintendent of police Deepan Bhadran, who was tasked with breaking this dangerous crime nexus, started by collecting technical data. They traced the mobile applications through which Patel’s victims got extortion calls which were made using voice over internet protocol (VOIP). Police gathered these IP addresses.
Cops then invoked the India-UK Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) which helped them seek details of Patel’s movements as well as details of IP addresses which he was using to communicate with his gang members and family.
The investigators were already following the money trail from Jamnagar to London and Patel was collected extortion money through various illegal channels. Police then traced some people through whose accounts Patel was getting the money and found that most of them were in the UK.
Patel, meanwhile, kept changing his locations.