A police team scanning CCTV footage looked at visuals from nearly 500 cameras to track the accused in the Saif Ali Khan case. One of the clearest markers in identifying the suspect across locations was the colour and pattern of his shoes. A team led by deputy commissioner of police Dikshit Gedam went through footage from cameras starting from the actor’s building, going towards Linking Road and Bandra station, then Dadar and Worli before tracking him to Thane. Other members of the team included assistant commissioner Adikrao Pol, senior inspector Sanjay Marathe, inspectors Ajay Lingnurkar and Sachin Rane, assistant inspectors Vijay Acharaker, Bajrang Jagtap, Tushar Sawant, and staff.
After escaping from the actor’s flat, Shariful loitered around in the Bandra and Khar locality for almost five-and-a-half hours before catching a train from Bandra station to Dadar. By then, he had had a haircut, had a bath, and changed his clothes. “When we started scanning through the CCTV we found the accused near Sadhu Vaswani Petrol pump in Bandra (West) on Linking road where he was found to have changed his shirt. As he knew, there was CCTV footage ahead, he crossed the road. But he was captured in the CCTV of a Khar hotel. After walking for almost a hour and a half, he slept at Khar station at 4 am before returning to Bandra in the morning and taking a train at 8 am to Dadar,” said police.
“We kept watching the leg and the shoe for three hours and finally found the person on the CCTV near National College in Khar. It resembled the CCTV image captured at the actor’s building. Then we found him at Bandra railway station and then outside Dadar where he purchased some mobile accessories before he boarded a bus to Worli on January 16. There he walked till he reached Worli-Koliwada and stayed in a room where the pub staff hired by Pandey stayed. “On Jan 17, in the afternoon he left Worli and reached Thane and hid in a labour camp before he was arrested,” said the police.
DCP (Zone IX) Dikshit Gedam said, “He had illegally entered the country before reaching Mumbai. He was in Mumbai and Thane for the last six months and has used different names. We are collecting details about the documents he has created. He moved to Thane a few months ago before he returned to Mumbai 15 days ago before executing the offence. He was working with some housekeeping agency in Thane before he committed the offence and was caught within 72 hours.”
“He was in urgent need of money and planned to rob anyone and immediately escape to Bangladesh,’’ said another officer. During the search at Thane, the police team had almost given up hope after combing the area on the city’s outskirts through the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday. By 2am, they had scanned 30-40 acres of land comprising nullahs and thorny bushes. The seniors kept egging their juniors on. Finally, the breakthrough came when one of them shone a torch on some bushes and found the accused lying there.
