MCOCA court acquits Chhota Rajan in 2011 Pakmodia Street firing case | Mumbai news
MUMBAI: A special Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) court on Monday acquitted gangster Rajendra Sadashiv Nikalje aka Chhota Rajan in the 2011 Pakmodia street firing case. Police had claimed that two gunmen had shot dead the bodyguard of Dawood Ibrahim’s brother, Iqbal Kaskar, on Pakmodia Street, at Rajan’s behest, but the court acquitted the gangster for want of cogent evidence.
According to the prosecution, on May 17, 2011, around 9.30pm, two gunmen reached Kaskar’s house on a bike and shot dead his bodyguard-cum-driver Arif Abubakar Sayyad. The gunmen – Indra Lalbahadur Khatri and Bilal Sayyad Mustafa – were nabbed by local police and the case was investigated by the crime branch, which claimed that Rajan was behind the killing of Sayyad as he wanted to establish supremacy over the rival gang led by Dawood Ibrahim.
The crime branch had arrested five others in the case including Adnan Hidayat Sayyed, who allegedly arranged SIM cards based on false documents and destroyed them after the crime; Abdul Rashid Sheikh who allegedly supplied firearms to the gunmen; Umed Hussain Sheikh and Ravi Bora, who allegedly arranged finance; and Asif Janmohammed Shaikh, who allegedly arranged the shooters.
Barring Rajan, the seven persons accused in the case had already faced trial, and the special court had convicted three of them on August 19, 2015. The court had found that the shooters, Indra Khatri and Bilal Sayyed, were complicit in the incident of firing while Abdul Rashid Sheikh was guilty of providing them with weapons, thus knowingly abetting the commission of crime. All three were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The 2015 judgement did not find any evidence of the act being part of organised crime or any link between the accused and Chhota Rajan.
“There is nothing on record as to how elimination of Arif would be helpful to Chhota Rajan to gain supremacy over rival gang. Thus, it is difficult to believe that offence under question is organised crime,” the then sessions judge had said.
Following Rajan’s acquittal in the Pakmodia street firing case, advocate Akash Pandey, who represented him along with advocate Sudeep Pasbola, said that five cases were now pending against the gangster, of which two had been stayed by the high court.
