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Vaze held, Tihar angle: Tracing the trail of probe
Sachin Vaze is under investigation for his role in the suspicious death of 48-year-old Mansukh Hiran, a Thane-based auto spare parts businessman, who was linked to the Scorpio.
A special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Mumbai on Sunday remanded assistant police inspector Sachin Vaze to custody till March 25 after the central agency arrested him late on Saturday for his alleged role in planting explosives in a vehicle found parked outside billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s house on February 25.
He is also under investigation for his role in the suspicious death of 48-year-old Mansukh Hiran, a Thane-based auto spare parts businessman, who was linked to the Scorpio.
Here’s what we know of Vaze’s alleged role — and the investigation into this case — so far.
A car outside Antilia
On February 25, when Bharat Patil, a security officer at Antilia, made a call to the Mumbai police control room and the Gamdevi police station regarding a suspicious SUV parked opposite the house where the Ambanis reside, Vaze, the head of the Crime Intelligence Unit, was one of the many officers who arrived at the scene.
A Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS) officer said the 2.5kg gelatin was enough to trigger a low-intensity blast, but that the gelatin sticks were not in the form of an assembled explosive device.
On February 26, Vaze was made lead investigator in the case and CCTV footage revealed that the Scorpio car arrived the previous night, accompanied by an Innova, and the driver left in the Innova after sitting in the car for a few hours. The driver was not visible. The Innova was later found at a toll point. The case was transferred to a higher ranking officer of the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad after the Opposition began to demand that the NIA be called in to investigate.
The police were able to link the car to Hiran within hours primarily because the Thane-based businessman reported it stolen on February 18.
It turned out that Hiran was using the car for the past three years, but it did not belong to him. It was given to him in lieu of a payment a man named Peter Newton defaulted on. On February 17, Hiran parked the car on the side of the road after the steering wheel got jammed while he was driving it. The next day, he visited the spot, but found the car missing. Hiran visited the CIU on February 26. He admitted that the car was his, but it had not been in his possession for over a week.
Between February 26 and March 4, Hiran was questioned. On March 5, his body washed ashore at a creek in Thane district. His belongings were missing, and his face was found covered with a scarf, with handkerchiefs stuck into his mouth.
The Union home ministry later directed NIA to take over the investigation into the explosives from the ATS; the FIR filed in the Gamdevi police station was re-registered and on March 9, an NIA team landed in Mumbai and began its investigations. It met various police officers who were part of the initial investigation, including Vaze, assistant commissioner of police Nitin Alaknure and ACP Sripad Kale.
A statement that set the ball rolling
Two days after his death, Hiran’s wife Vimla recorded her statement with ATS, which was now also tasked with investigating the murder. Her statement spoke at great length of Vaze’s connection to Hiran, and the Scorpio.
In her statement, Vimla told the investigators that Hiran, who knew Vaze well, lent him the Scorpio (that was found parked outside Antilia) in November 2020. Vaze’s driver dropped off the car at Hiran’s shop in Thane, on February 5, 2021. The car, she stated, had been in possession of Vaze for four months.
On March 4, Vimala said her husband returned from his shop at 8.30pm and told her that he was going to meet a police officer named Tawade, somewhere along Ghodbunder Road. Vimala told the investigating team that when she tried calling her husband at 11pm, his mobile phone was switched off. Later at night, when Hiran had still not returned home, Vinod called Vaze who reportedly expressed surprise at the meeting and informed Vinod that Hiran had not mentioned that he was going to meet Tawde.
The following morning, Hiran’s son Meet, and Vinod lodged a missing person’s report. Hiran’s body was found by fishermen on March 5 around 10.30am. Prima facie, the police said, it seemed that Hiran died by suicide. But Vimla contested that claim. She told the ATS team that Hiran was too good a swimmer to have drowned. “Taking into consideration all the above circumstances, I am sure that my husband was murdered,” her statement read. “I suspect Sachin Vaze could have committed the said murder.”
Based on her statement, ATS began to treat Hiran’s death not as a case of suicide or accidental drowning.
The ATS team questioned Vaze for several hours. On Friday, March 12, Vaze filed an anticipatory bail plea, which came up for hearing on Saturday. In his application, Vaze stated that he was in Dongri, South Mumbai, at the time of Hiran’s disappearance on the night of March 4, when the businessman left his home and didn’t return.
Vaze, the officer
Vaze joined the Maharashtra police force in 1990 as a sub inspector. His first posting was in Gadchiroli, a Maoist-affected area and he was moved to Thane city police in 1992. It was there that he gained a reputation of being a good criminal investigator.
In 2000, Vaze was transferred to the Powai unit of the Mumbai crime branch. It was during his stint there that, together with three other policemen, he faced a charge of murdering Khawaja Yunus, an accused in the 2002 Ghatkopar blast case. Vaze resigned from service on November 30, 2007. The following year, he joined the Shiv Sena.
Vaze was reinstated in the police force on June 6, 2020. So were the three other policemen who were booked for their alleged involvement in Yunus’s custodial death. A dispute over the framing of charges in this case is pending before the Bombay high court.
On Saturday, Vaze’s WhatsApp status made a reference to this case, when he wrote: “3rd March 2004. Fellow officers from the CID arrested me in a false case. That arrest inconclusive till date. Sensing the history is going to repeat. My fellow officers are on to falsely trap me.”
A Tihar jail angle
Indian Mujahideen terrorist Tehseen Akhtar was on Saturday questioned for “nearly four hours” inside the Tihar Jail by a team of the Delhi Police’s Special Cell in connection with the Mukesh Ambani bomb scare probe, according to officials. A mobile phone, recovered from Akhtar’s barrack in Tihar Jail, is suspected to have been used for creating a Telegram channel used by a group named Jaish-ul-Hind for claiming responsibility for parking the SUV with gelatin sticks.
