8 years on, forehead scar nails burglar

MUMBAI: A scar on the forehead and fingerprint marks led to the arrest of a habitual burglar who had been absconding since 2008, after a team from Mumbai crime branch

MUMBAI: A scar on the forehead and fingerprint marks led to the arrest of a habitual burglar who had been absconding since 2008, after a team from Mumbai crime branch located him at Thane central prison on Friday.

HT Image

The crime branch officials said that the accused would get arrested with a different identity every time he was nabbed, to avoid coming on police’s record as a habitual offender.

The establishment of the person’s identity was a task as he was found to be on the prison’s record with a different name. The accused, Janma Kumarmani Harijan was lodged in Thane prison in connection with a robbery case registered by Pant Nagar police station on whose record he was named Manikandan Murugan.

A team headed by senior inspector Ajay Sawant tracked down the accused after scanning through an exhaustive data of persons whose names Murugan had assumed.

“We learnt that to avoid a criminal trail in police’s record, Murugan had assumed at least five separate identities, which the team verified and finally landed in prison. It became clear after we started picking up his former aides who dropped a hint that Murugan was lodged in some prison,” said a crime branch officer.

After the officials tracked down Murugan they compared him to his photograph that was on police’s record, which did not match since it was considerably old.

“The scar helped police ascertain his identity and his fingerprints nailed him. Murugan had been in prison since 2015 and he committed similar offences between 2008 and 2015 when he was on the run,” added the officer. Concerned police stations will now seek his custody in connection with the crimes that he committed between 2008 and 2015, the last case in which he was serving sentence