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Mumbai crime branch arrested 5 accused in relation to former MLA Baba Siddiqui murder case and produced at Esplanade, in Mumbai.
| Salman Ansari
Mumbai: The Mumbai Crime Branch has arrested five more accused from Karjat in connection with the Baba Siddiqui murder case, as informed by the police.
The accused have been identified as Nitin Sapre (32), Sambhaji Pardhi (44), Ram Kanojia (43), Pradeep Thombare (37), and Chetan Pardhi (27). So far, the police have arrested a total of 9 accused in connection with this case.
When the five accused were presented before court, they were remanded to police custody until October 25. Nitin Sapre, one of the accused, has three cases registered against him, including charges of murder and attempted murder.
He is a resident of Dombivli and works as a parking attendant, as informed by the police. The police have speculated that a Turkish Tisas weapon might have been used in the shooting of Baba Siddiqui. During the investigation so far, the police have seized a country-made pistol, along with Australian and Turkish Tisas weapons.
Mumbai crime branch arrested 5 accused in relation to former MLA Baba Siddiqui murder case and produced at Esplanade, in Mumbai. | Salman Ansari
Mumbai crime branch arrested 5 accused in relation to former MLA Baba Siddiqui murder case and produced at Esplanade, in Mumbai. | Salman Ansari
Mumbai crime branch arrested 5 accused in relation to former MLA Baba Siddiqui murder case and produced at Esplanade, in Mumbai. | Salman Ansari
It has been revealed that the five accused arrested today had provided these weapons to the other accused, Dharamraj Kashyap and Shivkumar Gautam, according to the police. In the Baba Siddiqui murder case, the Crime Branch has arrested five more accused from the Karjat area.
The arrests were made after a night-long search operation in the area, where the accused had been hiding since the murder. The police gathered information from informants, technical evidence and managed to trace the accused.
Wanted accused Shubham Lonkar and arrested accused Ram Kanojia were both in contact with notorious wanted criminal Zeeshan Akhtar.
How the five accused came into contact: In 2017, five individuals committed a murder in Ambernath. In this case, Nitin Sapre, Chetan Pardhi, and Sambhaji Pardhi, along with two other accused, were held in Kalyan’s Aadharwadi Jail. Ram Kanojia was also incarcerated in the same jail for a separate attempted murder case. This is how all the accused met each other at Aadharwadi Jail. Ram Kanojia used to work at a construction site.The police have informed that Nitin Sapre and others were granted bail in 2022.