Crime branch busts land grabbing racket following military intelligence input, 7 arrested

Police said that they had received specific leads from the sleuths of the Southern Command Liaison Unit of the Military Intelligence earlier this month. The input was about a suspected organised gang, which was preparing forged documents for illegal immigrants from neighbouring countries, persons involved in anti-national activities, facilitating hawala transactions and for the land mafia.

“Following the leads, we zeroed down on the prime suspect Kalpesh Bohra, who hails from Khamgaon. We sent a decoy customer to him on the pretext of preparing fake documents. Using this bait, he was arrested,” said Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ramnath Pokale.

Starting with this first arrest on May 12, the Crime Branch of Pune City Police arrested seven suspects and conducted raids at multiple locations across the state till May 22. The police recovered several forged documents and equipment used for preparing fake documents like aadhar cards, PAN cards, voter ID cards and bank documents.

Three of seven suspects are currently in police custody while others have been remanded to judicial custody.

The prime accused, Bohra (42), was a property agent and is the alleged mastermind behind the racket. Five of the six others arrested are property agents from Pune, Thane and Khamgaon while the sixth person was an accomplice helping in the forgery of documents. The details of the investigation were shared with the media on Thursday.

According to the investigation, initially, the suspects used to identify neglected land tracts using online mapping tools coupled with the information given to them by other property agents. After verifying that the land is neglected by the owner or owner is untraceable or has not paid attention to the land in years or is dead, they took steps to usurp the land. First, they used to get access to the land-related papers from the concerned land registry office and then prepare fake documents of the owner.

The suspects first used to prepare forged copies of PAN cards or Voter ID cards, and later a person used to be sent to an aadhar facilitation centre in Khamgaon where on the pretext of updating a certain aadhar card, a pseudo identity of the landowner was created with fake documents. These fake documents were then used to open a bank account and then execute the sale of the land. Among the sales executed by the racketeers in this manner, land deals made in the Mulshi area of Pune Ambernath and Panvel near Mumbai and Kothrud in Pune are under the scanner of the investigators.

When asked whether the investigation will also look into the possible involvement of officials from the land registry offices and executives at the aadhar facilitation centre in Khamgaon, Pokale said, “We will probe that angle.”