Sleuths of the Special Task Force (STF) claimed to have made three major breakthrough during the last 24-hours when they busted a gang duping public in the name of mobile towers in lucknow & Gorakhpur, arrested three hardened criminals in Kanpur and lastly held four youths which included a sibling who won zonal level tournaments but were involved in kidnapping and extorting money in Gautam Budh Nagar (Noida).
IG (law & order), RK Vishwakarma disclosed here on Thursday evening that in the first success, STF sleuths who were working on the gang which published advertisement inviting tenders for installing mobile towers and later extort money in the name of security deposit, when they laid a trap here at lucknow and in Gorakhpur and arrested four persons. While Praduman Nath Dubey and Sanjeet Kumar Mall, both natives of Deoria and residing here in Gomati Nagar were arrested from lucknow, Brijesh Upadhaya and Manish Shukla, both natives of Gorakhpur were held in Gorakhpur on Thursday.
The cops recovered 19 mobiles phones, several credit and SIM cards besides cash and other documents from the possession of the accused. later Praduman and Sanjeet were taken to Pratapgarh to produce them before local magistrate as case against them was registered there at Nawabganj police station.
RK Vishwakarma said that in another development on Thursday, sleuths of the STF laid a trap on four accused who had kidnapped Kunal and Sahir, both students of Amity University in Noida when they were going on Marcedes Car on last Tuesday. The kidnappers also extorted Rs 50 lakh from Kunal’s father and Rs 35 lakh from Sahir’s father and later set them free. Those arrested by STF on Thursday revealed their identity asYashweer, Somweer, Vivek Tyagi, all residents of Meerut and Sahil, hailing from Bulundshahr. While Yashweer was a physical instructor at JP Academy in Meerut, his brother Somweer had won gold in zonal level competition in Javelin throw.
RK Vishwakarma claimed that during interrogation the accused from whom over Rs 80 lakh of ransom amount was also recovered, disclosed that they used to target those rich students whom they found traveling in luxury cars and later they immediately demand ransom from their family members and set the victims free immediately after receiving the money. So far they extorted money from several families and also confirmed of collecting Rs 85 lakh from the family members of above two students.
Interestingly the modus operandi used by the criminals was also unique. While two of them posed them as police officer, third one worn a police uniform and carry a carbine just like the police officials do. They stopped youths in the name of checking and later kidnapped them.
lastly, on Wednesday, the STF sleuths arrested three hardened criminals from Kanpur. They were identified as Mangal Singh aka Arun Kumar aka Santram, a resident of Kanpur Dehat, Mahaweer aka Shubham Singh, hailing from Kannauj and Aslam aka Ajay, a native of Farukabad.
The held accused were involved in several cases of auto-theft and even in cases of kidnapping as well as that of cheating.