Mumbai: MCOCA Court Acquits 2 Men Allegedly Associated With Gangster Ravi Pujari In 2019 Builder Extortion Case

Mumbai: The special court for Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) has acquitted two men allegedly associated with gangster Ravi Pujari, booked in connection with an extortion case registered on the complaint of a builder in 2019.

About The Case

The Anti-Extortion Cell had arrested William Rodrigues, 30, and Akash Shetty, 40, after the builder's family claimed that Pujari had threatened them to extort Rs 25 crore, which was negotiated down to Rs 2 crore. The complainant, whose identity is kept protected, has claimed that all the family members, turn by turn, had received calls from Pujari for extortion. The first call with the demand came on November 26, 2018.

The family expressed their inability to pay due to reduced work. However, the next day, Pujari called them back with the list of their ongoing projects. The family claimed that from November 26, 2018, to January 15, 2019, Pujari got in touch with all the family members of the complainant and threatened them to kill the builder’s sons if he did not get Rs 2 crore.

Fed up with the repeated calls, the builder approached the Goregaon police station on January 15, 2019. The case was later transferred to the Anti-Extortion Cell. The police claimed that the two accused collected details of the family of the builder, their business, and their other details and passed it to Pujari.

The prosecution had claimed that Pujari was heading the crime syndicate and threatened to kill the family members. The prosecution heavily relied on the call data records, voice recordings of the calls, along with the confession of Rodrigues. The defence lawyer, MB Shirsath and Rajendra Rathod, however, claimed that the accused had been falsely implicated as they were arrested within two hours of registration of the case.

Besides, he claimed that Rodrigues was forced to give a confession statement as his parents were detained by the police. The court noted that the police had not followed proper procedure in extracting the voice recordings from the phone; hence, it was not reliable. Besides the key witnesses, family members of the builder had made several improvements in their testimony, which had no mention in their statement.

This raised several doubts in these testimonies. Besides, the court discarded the confession statement of Rodrigues, which was crucial evidence, observing procedural lapses. The court noted, “The presence of a police officer on February 1, 2019, in the confession room with other police officers in civil dress, the investigating officer and the accused’s parents clearly reflects that the confession was an outcome of threat inducement and not voluntary in nature.”

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