MCOCA slapped on gang leader posing as crime branch officer
A man who dropped out of school in the 4th standard and built a criminal career by impersonating Crime Branch police officers to rob and cheat people across India. The man has had the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) invoked against him by Delhi’s Central District Police, less than two years after he walked out of judicial custody in a previous MCOCA case in Mumbai and went straight back to crime.
The accused, Nasir Hafiz Khan, also known as Irani and Sameer, is a resident of Bhogal in Delhi, originally from Ambiwali in Mumbai. He has 38 criminal cases against him across Delhi, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana.
DCP Central District Rohit Rajbir Singh confirmed the action. “Approval under Section 23(1)(a) MCOCA was granted by senior officers after detailed scrutiny of evidence, following which a fresh FIR under Section 3 MCOCA was registered against the organised crime syndicate,” Singh said.
The trick at the heart of Khan’s operation is the part that should worry ordinary citizens most. He and his associates would impersonate Crime Branch police officers to gain the trust of victims before robbing or cheating them. The badge, the manner, and the authority that people instinctively defer to — all of it was a costume.
The case that brought him to Delhi Police’s attention this time was registered as FIR No. 389/2025 at the DBG Road police station, involving a robbery of `18.84 lakh committed on October 23, 2025. That robbery happened barely two months after Khan had been released from judicial custody in a prior MCOCA case registered by Mumbai Police, where he had remained jailed until August 2024.
After the Delhi robbery, Khan went on the run, and the trail he left behind reads like a tour of India’s crime map. He fled from Mumbai to Nagpur, where he was booked in two separate cheating cases within days of each other in November 2025, one involving the theft of jewellery weighing approximately 75 grams and the other a gold chain of approximately 10 tolas. From Nagpur, he moved to Ajmer in Rajasthan, where he allegedly cheated a senior citizen woman of gold jewellery worth approximately Rs 40 lakh in December 2025.
Police finally caught up with him on January 3, 2026, after what the department described as painstaking work involving scrutiny of thousands of CCTV footage clips, sustained technical surveillance, and meticulous fieldwork by the police team. At his instance, police recovered five mobile phones, internet dongles, the car he had been paying off using money from the robbery, the bag used in the crime, and other incriminating documents.
What made Khan eligible for MCOCA, a law typically associated with mafia-style organised crime, was the pattern investigators uncovered. He had been charged with multiple cognisable offences carrying sentences of three years or more, with courts taking cognisance in 16 of his cases registered in Delhi alone.
Despite ongoing prosecutions, he continued to commit robberies, including cases registered at the DBG Road and Prasad Nagar police stations, thereby fulfilling the legal definition of continuing unlawful activity required to invoke the Act.
