Saki Naka police nab drug kingpin Lalit Patil from Bengaluru

The Mumbai and Pune police had been on the lookout for the 34-year-old Patil ever since he escaped from Sassoon Hospital.

MUMBAI: A fortnight after he fled from Sassoon General Hospital in Pune, the Mumbai police on Tuesday arrested suspected drug kingpin Lalit Patil from a hotel in Bengaluru and brought him to the city in the early hours of Wednesday. A local court has remanded him to police custody till Monday.

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The Mumbai and Pune police had been on the lookout for the 34-year-old Patil ever since he escaped from Sassoon Hospital. It was around 10 pm on October 2 that the well-built six-footer, his face hidden by a surgical mask, had stepped out of the hospital and walked 1.2 kilometres to the Lemon Tree Hotel near Pune Railway Station before disappearing.

When he was produced in court on Wednesday, Patil spoke to the judge through the public prosecutor and said that he apprehended a threat to his life from the Pune police. He also reportedly told some media persons that he had not run away from the hospital willingly but was made to.

Sources said that the investigating team got a clue about Patil’s location through a phone call that he made to one of his associates who had been picked up in the same case on Saturday. “He kept getting calls from an unknown number in the presence of police officers and kept disconnecting,” said a police officer. “The police then forced him to receive the call and put the phone on speaker mode. When the person on the other end began talking, they realised it was Patil.” The police then tracked Patil to a hotel in Bengaluru’s Channasandra locality, from where he was picked up on Tuesday night.

Patil had got rid of his old phone, due to which the Pune police, from whose custody he had escaped, were unable to track him. Policemen from both Mumbai and Pune kept talking to several of Patil’s family members, relatives, friends and acquaintances to try and locate him. The Pune police were able to arrest Bhushan Patil on October 10 from Uttar Pradesh, from where he had planned to flee to Nepal. Sources said that Lalit Patil also had plans to flee to Sri Lanka.

“Through the interviews of several acquaintances of the Patil brothers, we were able to trace the route he took to reach Bengaluru,” said a Saki Naka officer. “From Pune, he went to Chalisgaon, then to Surat, Dhule, Solapur, Bijapur and finally to Bengaluru. His next destination was Chennai, but he took a stop to rest at a hotel in Bengaluru, where we intercepted him.”

Known among law enforcers as a hardened drug peddler, Patil was first arrested in December 2020 during a crackdown on the production, sale and trafficking of mephedrone or MD, also known as Meow Meow in popular parlance. The cops found a drug-manufacturing unit in Pimpri Chinchwad, from where they seized 132 kilos of MD. After his arrest, Patil was kept in Yerawada Prison. He was admitted to Sassoon Hospital in June, from where he escaped on October 2.

The peddler was part of a gang of 22 men who produced MD at locations ranging from farmhouses in Raigad to shuttered chemical plants in Nashik and then sold it in the open market. The gang was led by the Mumbai-based Arvindkumar Prakashchand Lohare, 39. A chemistry graduate, Lohare was known as “doctor” in the pharma units that dot Chakan and Nashik for his expertise in manufacturing MD. Lalit Patil allegedly raised finance for Lohare.

Two weeks ago, the Saki Naka police busted a factory in Nashik called Sri Ganeshay Pharmaceuticals which, under the garb of a pharmaceutical plant, was manufacturing MD. The factory was suspected to be Lalit Patil’s and was being operated by his brother Bhushan Patil.

“Patil is the 15th person to be arrested in the case which began with the arrest of a peddler,” said joint commissioner of police (law and order) Satyanarayan Chaudhary. “The Saki Naka police went through the hierarchy of drug peddlers, and arrested 12 people from Dharavi, Kalyan and Nashik Road before discovering that their supplies came from the Nashik factory. Drugs were being manufactured and supplied from here to peddlers across the state. The police have seized over 150 kg of MD worth more than ₹300 crore.”