The Delhi Police on Wednesday said four more people were arrested in connection with the IPL spot-fixing case and claimed to have accounted for a part of the Rs 10 lakh sum that cricketer Sreesanth allegedly received from the bookies.
Among those arrested is the Kerala pacer’s friend Abhishek Shukla, an event manager who was earlier questioned by the Special Cell. Abhishek is accused of destroying evidence by cleaning up Sreesanth’s hotel room.
Coming to know about Sreesanth’s arrest through his “own channels,” Sreesanth’s bookie friend Jiju Janardhan alerted Abhishek and asked him to clean up the room, said a source. Among the articles that Shukla removed was the money that both Sreesanth and Jiju received from the bookies.
It is through Abhishek — who now faces charges under Section 201 of the Indian Penal Code and has been taken to Mumbai following his arrest — that the police are trying to recover the money and other items that he allegedly hid, said the source.
However, it is still not clear how Sreesanth’s laptop remained in the room. The Mumbai Police had claimed to have recovered it from the same room three days after the pacer’s arrest.
Three other persons arrested in connection with the case are Vicky Chowdhary, a bouncer at a nightclub here, and his accomplices Nitin Jain and Vinod Sharma, both alleged punters. It is alleged that Vicky approached Bhupender Nagar (also a bouncer and currently in police custody) to arrange meetings with some cricketers in the first week of May. Nagar then invited cricketer Ajit Chandila to a nightclub in South Delhi.
At Vicky’s insistence the police arrested Shalimar Bagh-resident Nitin and Vinod, who owns a property dealing firm and lives in Krishna Nagar. With the latest arrests, as many as 26 people have been held in connection with the case.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Yahya, who was arrested by the Delhi Police Special Cell at Hyderabad on May 24, was produced before a court and sent to judicial custody on Wednesday.
While the police denied that Malayalam actor Rajiv Pillai, who was with Sreesanth at the time of his arrest in Mumbai earlier this month, had anything to do with the spot-fixing, they said nothing that they had come across so far linked actor Vindoo Dara Singh, who was arrested by the Mumbai Police, to Sreesanth.
