Mumbai: Six months after the lid was blown off the Call Detail Records (CDR) case, a Thane Police on Monday arrested Saurabh Sahoo, one of the prime accused in the case, in New Delhi.
The racket was busted in January with the arrest of four Navi Mumbai-based private detectives, who were allegedly selling CDRs of targets requested by clients. Mr Sahoo, a Delhi resident, emerged as one of the main suppliers of CDRs. These records are confidential and can be legally provided by cellular service operators only to a police officer of the rank of Superintendent of Police (SP) and above.
According to police sources, a team from Thane Police Crime Branch’s Unit I picked up Mr. Sahoo from Ghaziabad early on Monday. A Crime Branch officer said, “Mr Sahoo was taken into custody from near a garments store he was running in Ghaziabad after we received a tip-off about his whereabouts. We had visited the same area at least four to five times in the last six months on his trail.”
Mr Sahoo was brought to Thane from New Delhi on Monday afternoon and produced in court, which remanded him in police custody till June 29.
Police role suspected
Mr. Sahoo was arrested by Delhi Police in 2017 in a similar case, and was subsequently released on bail. The police suspect he was obtaning the CDRs by either posing as a high-ranking police officer, or in collusion with some police personnel. These aspects are being probed, the officer said, adding, “It’s possible the same contacts in the police who helped him source the CDRs might also have helped him evade arrest till now. We are interrogating him to verify this and are also going through his call records to find out who he has been in touch with the most in the last six months.”
The police have so far arrested 17 accused in the case, including Rajani Pandit, India's first woman private detective. She is accused of sourcing CDRs illegally from one of the detectives arrested in the case. Among the other accused are Pune-based techie Ajinkya Nagargoje and Yavatmal Police Constable Nitin Khavde, who allegedly obtained CDRs by misusing the official email address of the SP, Yavatmal, and Police Constable Bhubhaneshwar Das of the Assam Police.
The officer said, “The number of accused arrested for supplying CDRs to private detectives indicates they were getting the CDRs from a wide network of sources. Mr. Sahoo’s interrogation is likely to lead to more suspects who were in a position to illegally obtain CDRs and provide them to private detectives in Mumbai and other cities.”
The case also brought several celebrities under the scanner for their alleged association with the arrested accused, including actors Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Udita Goswami and Sahil Khan, and Jackie Shroff's wife Ayesha.
