Undri’s labourer held as Pune cops claim breakthrough in Bopdev Ghat gang rape

Pune: The city police claimed first breakthrough in the gang rape of the event management student (21) in Bopdev Ghat, following the arrest of a labourer (24) in the early hours of Friday.
A search is on for his two other accomplices, police said. "The arrested man hails from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. He moved to Pune four years ago for livelihood. He has been residing at Kadnagar in Undri for the past four years," Pune commissioner of police (CP) Amitesh Kumar told reporters in the evening.
Kumar did not reveal the suspect's name, pointing out that the police were still after the other two accomplices and needed to conduct a test identification parade before going public with the names. "One of the wanted suspects is a rickshaw driver hailing from Nagpur and the other is a ragpicker from Pune. All three know each other very well and have criminal antecedents," he said.
"The arrested man is one of the two suspects, whose sketches were earlier released based on the description of the survivor's friend, a chartered accountancy student. He was overpowered, tied and assaulted during the crime. The suspect's sketch matched 98% with the footage of the suspects captured by CCTV cameras at a fuel station on Saswad Road and at an eatery in Warje Malwadi and those collected during investigation," the CP said.
The survivor, from a city in Gujarat, and her CA friend (22) from north Maharashtra had gone to Bopdev Ghat on a night out around 11pm on Oct 3. An hour later, the three men approached them near the "Table Point" on the ghat. They assaulted and forced her friend to remove his shirt and trouser belt. They used the same to tie him up, before raping the young woman.
The breakthrough came after a massive weeklong manhunt, during which 700 police personnel drawn from different units worked tirelessly on human and technical intelligence inputs, analysis of call data records and other aspects.
Kumar said, "The first critical information came from our informers. They gave us leads about some suspects with criminal antecedents. Our teams circulated their details to police stations in and outside Pune, and ran a check on their criminal history. From this, we secured their full names and cellphone numbers. Then we put their phones on the tracking system."
A crime branch officer, a part of the investigation, said, "One of the phone numbers was put on a smartphone app used to identify callers and block spam. This helped us in securing the photo of one of the suspects. We found the symbol of an eatery behind his photo. The eatery was in Kadnagar. Its owner identified the photo, name and address of the suspect. We then detained him early Friday morning."
CP Kumar said the case was difficult to crack because the crime spot was in an isolated area with no street light, poor network connectivity and no CCTV surveillance. "We used a drone twice to map the ghat section, and identified lanes, by-lanes and arterial roads passing through Bopdev village and other places. We concluded that the suspects had stopped for nearly 50 minutes at one of the places. They had taken multiple U-turns and travelled up to a distance of over 80km to Saswad and other places in Pune city. They had fled in different directions and switched off their cellphones between 10pm and 8am."
He said, "We conducted physical verification at these places, but did not get leads. We checked 4,000 people whose images were caught in CCTV footage and identified one of the suspects, but his identity was not confirmed. We later found two footage capturing clear images of the same suspect and two men. These were shared with our informers and were shown to criminals, and this helped us in establishing their identities," he said.