When Indian gangster Ravi Pujari was arrested from a barbershop in Dakar, Senegal by local police in January 2019, 25 years had passed since he had disappeared.
Pujari, who had ties to the Mumbai underworld, had disappeared in 1994 and was residing in West African countries such as Burkina Faso and Senegal, posing as Antony Fernandes, a respected businessman with interests in hotel and plumbing businesses. “Fernandes” was a partner in an Indian hotel chain in West Africa, a philanthropist who sponsored weekend cricket matches and a respected citizen in the local communities where he lived with his family.
Pujari’s downfall began after he started targeting several politicians in Karnataka from 2015 to 2018 with extortion offers. This led the state police to launch a concerted effort to track down the “ghost gangster” who had maintained a high level of stealth by using technologies such as Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) to threaten targets of blackmail. .
Pujari’s arrest on 19 January 2019 and his eventual extradition to India to stand trial was facilitated by investigations and human intelligence gathered on foreign shores using resources in Indian missions in African countries such as Senegal, Ghana and Burkina Faso.
A big project for the police
Ravi Pujari, who had positioned himself as a “patriotic gangster”, had been associated with the Dawood Ibrahim gang before the 1993 Mumbai blasts split it along sectarian lines. He was later associated with the Chhota Rajan gang that emerged in Mumbai.
When Karnataka police began serious efforts to track down Pujari, there was little information in West Africa about the gangster’s past or his continued involvement in running an extortion racket that targeted businessmen, actors and politicians in India using local gangs he built using his old networks. .
Since 1994, when he disappeared after posting bail in a Mumbai gangland murder case, Pujari was known to have traveled to Nepal, Bangkok, Australia, Uganda and west Africa, but his exact location was not known in 2018.
Tracking down Pujari proved to be a difficult task for the police as the gangster made extortion calls where the call records showed calls originating from the Pacific region, western Europe and Africa. Some police units allegedly in conflict with Pujari also did not help.
How Pujari was traced
A tip-off that Pujari is an investor in a chain of restaurants called ‘Maharaja’ located in several West African countries led the police to track down the gangster in West Africa. Police found that Pujari was living under the identity of Antony Fernandes in Burkina Faso and that he had probably moved to Senegal.
Indian foreign officials in Senegal who were alerted to Pujari’s presence in the country sought the assistance of the Senegalese authorities, including the country’s interior minister and the office of the Senegalese President.
One of the major leads in efforts to find Pujari in Senegal came in early December 2018 from a local publication that carried a photo of Pujari under the alias Antony Fernandes at a local cricket event where he was hailed as an outstanding citizen and philanthropist.
Following this, the Indian authorities in Senegal were alerted by local officials and Fernandes alias Pujari was placed under surveillance. The Karnataka Police was also notified to create the required file to arrest and extradite the gangster.
On January 19, 2019, when Pujari visited a local barber shop in Dakar, local authorities swooped down and arrested him. A year later, on 22 February 2020, he was handed over to Indian authorities and brought back by a Karnataka Police team led by then Additional General Manager of Police (ADGP) (Intelligence) Amar Kumar Pandey, who was tasked with finding Pujari in July 2018.
Targeting policies is proving costly
Shifting from his modus operandi of primarily targeting businessmen with extortion demands, Ravi Pujari allegedly targeted 10 politicians in Karnataka between 2015 and 2018. The politicians were Congress leaders UT Khader, Abhaychandra Jain, Ramanath Rai in 2015. HM Revanna in 2016. MP DK Suresh in 2017. Tanvir Sait, CM Ibrahim and Anil Lad in 2018. and Janata Dal (secular) leaders SR Mahesh and CB Suresh Babu in 2017.
Growing threats of extortion resulted in then Karnataka police chief Neelamani Raju assigning the task of finding Pujari and bringing him to justice to then ADGP Pandey, who retired as director general of police in 2022.
In August 2017, Pujari allegedly targeted MP Suresh shortly after the MP and his brother, current Congress chief DK Shivakumar, were involved in guarding 44 MLAs from Gujarat ahead of Rajya Sabha elections in the state.
On 22 June 2018, a personal secretary to former union aviation minister CM Ibrahim filed a criminal intimidation complaint with the Bangalore police saying that a person claiming to be Pujari sent a message saying, “Don’t speak against the country or myself. people will…”
Three years before his arrest, Pujari had moved to Senegal. “He shifted his base to Senegal where he started a restaurant named Maharaja but continued his blackmail and threat operations against people from the film industry, businessmen, real estate developers and professionals and also got involved in political activities,” Pandey said.
Major cases
By 2018, in Karnataka alone, 96 cases, including murders in some cases where businessmen had not succumbed to extortion demands, had been piled against the elusive Pujari. There have also been dozens of cases of murder, extortion and extortion in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala and other states.
In Bengaluru, he was accused of involvement in the January 5, 2001 shooting of real estate businessman Subbaraju in the heart of the city (he was acquitted in that case in 2022) as well as the February 15, 2007 shooting of two employees at the office of Shabnam Developers, a real estate company , whose owner allegedly resisted Pujari’s blackmail bid (he is on trial in the case).
Issuance process
Pujari, who had taken a new name, was identified through fingerprints sent to Senegalese authorities. The extradition documents, including French translations of the messages where Pujari’s aides were arrested, were sent in March 2019.
In the absence of a bilateral extradition treaty with Senegal, the Indian government proceeded to extradite Pujari under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNCTOC), adopted in 2000 as “the primary international instrument for combating transnational organized crime”. .
Cases filed against Pujari under the Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act facilitated his extradition under the UNCTOC and Interpol Red Corner notices issued against Pujari facilitated his arrest in Senegal.
“We had come across some pictures of him on the Internet. But when we saw him in person it was kind of a mixed feeling of surprise and wonder,” Pandey said after the release in February 2022. “The long pursuit of this ghost-like figure has come to an end.”