Gangster Ravi Pujari, 59, who was extradited from Senegal in February 2020 to stand trial for dozens of crimes in several parts of India, was acquitted by a sessions court in Bengaluru for want of evidence in one of the city’s most infamous underworld killings.
Pujari has been acquitted of charges of plotting the murder of businessman Subbaraju in Bengaluru on January 5, 2001. Pujari had been charged of plotting the murder in a conspiracy involving gangster Muthappa Rai, who was acquitted in the case in 2004 and died in 2020.
Pujari has also been acquitted of charges of supplying the two guns used to shoot Subbaraju at his office in the Seshadripuram area of Bengaluru. Pujari was accused of sending the guns used for the murder of Subbaraju in a gift box with the help of gangster Guru Satam, who has not been arrested in connection with the case.
The murder of Subbaraju, a builder, had rocked Bengaluru in 2001. Two gunmen had barged into his office and shot him in the presence of his two sons.
Investigations had revealed that Subbaraju was involved in a dispute with a rival, K L Swamy, over the purchase of a prime property measuring 1,40,000 square feet on Cunningham Road in the central business district of Bengaluru.
Muthappa Rai, who was in Dubai at the time, is alleged to have intervened in the dispute and demanded that Subbaraju walk away from the deal. When Subbaraju did not back down, a conspiracy was allegedly hatched by Rai along with Pujari and Guru Satam — both of whom were part of the Chhota Rajan gang in Mumbai — to kill the builder.
Two shooters, Yusuf Bachkana and Nitin Sawant, allegedly travelled from Mumbai to carry out the murder with the aid of three local co-conspirators who surveyed Subbaraju’s movements.
In the course of its investigation, the Bengaluru Police arrested Rai (he was extradited from Dubai in 2001), the two hired shooters, and the local conspirators in the case — Syed Babu, Arif Pasha, and Santhosh Kumar.
On April 13, 2004, a trial court in Bengaluru convicted one of the shooters, Bachkana, to life imprisonment. Sawant, the other alleged shooter, was acquitted by the trial court, but died in September 2014 in a Mumbai Police encounter.
The trial court also acquitted Rai, Babu, Pasha and Kumar in the case for want of evidence.
The Karnataka High Court in 2004 upheld the acquittals, but pulled up the Karnataka Police for lack of effective supervision of its investigations by senior officers. The court suggested this was a cause for evidence not being brought in an effective manner to court, leading to the acquittals.
The case against Pujari and Satam, however, were pending on police files on account of the two remaining at large.
In February 2020, following the Pujari’s extradition from Senegal, a split chargesheet was filed against him, while the case against Satam was separated.
Pujari argued that he could not be tried in the Subbaraju murder case since he had been extradited from Senegal specifically to stand trial for the 2007 Shabnam Developers shootout case in Bengaluru where two employees of the realty firm were killed by hired shooters linked to Pujari.
Last week, on August 18, the trial court acquitted Pujari in the Subbaraju murder case, saying there was no evidence to “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that he conspired with others to send Bachkana and Sawant to shoot the builder.
The court also said there was no evidence to show that in pursuance of the conspiracy, Pujari and Satam “sent one 0.9 mm pistol, one .38 revolver, and live bullets in a gift packet through Hawala” to Bachkana and Sawant who were in Bengaluru.
The court observed that police had only produced a statement made by Pujari after his extradition in 2020 as fresh evidence in the case, which is inadmissible in court.
Pujari is under trial at present in connection with the February 15, 2007 shooting of two workers at the office of Shabnam Developers, a realty firm in south Bengaluru, whose owner K S Samiullah, a businessman and local politician, resisted Pujari’s alleged extortion bid.
While Pujari was extradited primarily in connection with this case, there are 96 other cases of extortion against him in Karnataka, including 39 in Bengaluru and 36 in Mangaluru. There are also dozens of cases in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala and other states.
Pujari had been using the identity of Antony Fernandes, a Burkina Faso national and businessman, when he was tracked down in Senegal in January 2019 by Indian agencies.
He was eventually located and detained at a barber’s shop in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, by local police. Senegal’s Interior Ministry informed Indian authorities on January 21, 2019 about the detention.
In the absence of a bilateral extradition treaty with Senegal, the Indian government moved for extraditing Pujari under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, adopted in 2000 as “the main international instrument in the fight against transnational organized crime”.
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Shifting from a modus operandi of primarily targeting businessmen with extortion demands, Pujari allegedly targeted 10 politicians in Karnataka between 2015 and 2018, leading to pressure on the Karnataka Police to bring Pujari to book.
The politicians targeted by Pujari in the run-up to the Karnataka Police launching a serious effort to find the gangster in July 2018 were Congress leaders U T Khader, Abhaychandra Jain and Ramanath Rai in 2015; H M Revanna in 2016; D K Suresh in 2017; Tanvir Sait, C M Ibrahim and Anil Lad in 2018, and Janata Dal (Secular) leaders S R Mahesh and C B Suresh Babu in 2017.
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