Three men accused of drugging businessmen and then fleeing with their valuables were arrested by the crime branch on Thursday.
Claiming inspiration from the stories of none other than Charles Sobhraj, the three men - Manish Soni (36), Sachin Gandhi (28) and Avinder Singh (45) - duped businessmen not just in Delhi but also Haryana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Goa and Nepal. They were allegedly involved in as many as 70 such cases.
Importantly, the police have also arrested three Delhi jewellers for buying stolen items from the con men. Two of them are prominent Karol Bagh jewellers - Vijay Kohli, who owns New Jhelum Jewellers, and Sumesh Dua, the owner of Maharani Jewellers. Another Karol Bagh jeweller K L Jain, the owner of Kailash Jewellers, is on the run. The owner of Aggarwal Jewellers, Manish Aggarwal, in Ashram has also been arrested for the same offence.
"As many as 23 mobile phones, Rs 16,000 cash, several ATM and credit cards and four cars were seized from them. A huge quantity of sedative tablets was also found. The three were planning to flee to Nepal when they were caught," said additional commissioner (crime) Satyendra Garg, adding that while Soni belongs to Delhi, Gandhi and Avinder are from Karnal.
All three of them were arrested by the newly formed crime branch unit, SOS, which is headed by ACP Rajbir Singh. Soni was arrested from Tilak Nagar. The other two were arrested from Alipur in northwest Delhi. They told the police that they usually used Larpose to induce sleep in their victims. These tablets were procured from Karnal.
Their victims include a Safdarjung Enclave businessman who was summoned for a business meeting to a Connaught Place hotel. He was drugged and the accused fled with his credit cards and mobile phones. They purchased jewellery worth more than Rs 40,000 with the cards. In several such cases, the three accused masqueraded as businessmen.
For this, they hired luxury vehicles and travelled by air. Some of their victims were NRIs whom they met in flights or trains. The police said that they visited Kathmandu frequently. "Whenever their efforts yielded more than Rs 50,000, they went to Nepal and visited casinos there," said a police officer.
Ajay Chowdhury, a former resident of New Delhi, was allegedly Sobhraj's trusted lieutenant in the 70s, helping him commit a series of murders, robberies and passport thefts, according to the Nepal police and Interpol.
Chowdhury is also suspected of burning the victims' bodies to prevent quick identification.
According to Interpol, in December 1975, Sobhraj and Canadian Marie-Andree Leclerc, who was his mistress as well as second accomplice, came to Kathmandu from Bangkok, where they had set up base.
In Bangkok, Sobhraj and his partners killed Dutch tourist Henricus Bintanja and his girlfriend Cornelia Hemker. Then Sobhraj and Leclerc used the victims' passports to arrive in Kathmandu.
According to the Nepal police, Sobhraj befriended American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich and her companion Canadian Laurent Carriere in Kathmandu, killed both and, following his old modus operandi, burnt the bodies.
Chowdhury was also in Kathmandu at that time and was spotted in the five-star hotel where Sobhraj was staying. He is also believed to have been involved in the grisly double murder.
"After the discovery of the bodies, we traced Chowdhury to a hotel in Kathmandu - Monumental Lodge near the historic royal palace in Basantapur," says Bishwa Lal Shrestha, who was the police officer investigating the case in 1975.
"But he gave us the slip. When we reached the lodge, we found he had slipped out minutes before."
The trio - Sobhraj, Leclerc and Chowdhury - left Nepal by land to go to Varanasi in India, where they continued with murders and robberies.
Sobhraj's luck ran out in 1976 when both he and Leclerc were arrested and sent to jail. She agreed to testify against him, was paroled and deported to Canada. In 1984, the 38-year-old Leclerc died of ovarian cancer.
However, despite Delhi Police's attempts to nab him, Chowdhury remained at large.
According to a book published on Sobhraj, in 1976 the three had gone to Malaysia where Chowdhury was sent on an errand to collect gems from a mining town. When he returned, the two men went into a jungle but only Sobhraj returned.
Shrestha, however, discounts the theory that Chowdhury was murdered by Sobhraj to obliterate records of their crimes.
"Chowdhury was spotted much later in Germany," he says.
When the nearly three-decade-old double murder case file was reopened in Nepal in 2003 following Sobhraj's arrest in Kathmandu, the police once again began a lookout for Chowdhury.
"I feel Nepal is safer for him than India," Shrestha says. "The Indian police are more organised, also, he is better known in India. In Nepal, after 30 years, it would be easy for Chowdhury to hide himself."