He was caught after being tracked using CCTV footage, mobile phone data and a tip-off from his employer.
The Bangladeshi immigrant is believed to have entered India illegally in 2024 and moved to Mumbai seeking employment. Police said his plan was to commit a robbery and flee to Bangladesh. A court remanded Shariful to the custody of the police for interrogation for five days.
A planned theft, a random attack
Saif Ali Khan’s help had told the police that the attacker had demanded Rs 1 crore and threatened to hold Saif and Kareena’s younger son hostage. In a scuffle with the intruder, Saif suffered multiple knife wounds.
The suspect allegedly confessed to the police that he had tried to break into another flat in the same building and didn’t know he was in the actors’ home.
Shariful’s attempted break-in at the other flat in the building proved unsuccessful, which prompted him to enter Saif’s house. Saif’s family occupies top four floors of the 13-storey Sadguru Sharan building.
Police said that an out-of-work Shariful had surveyed the area on December 31, 2024 during a New Year’s night walk. The Bangladeshi national was living in a room in the Worli-Koliwada area in central Mumbai.
The police said that Shariful hired an autorickshaw to explore areas in Bandra and Khar until the following morning.
“He even inquired with the rickshaw driver, whom he hired, to take him to the locality that houses businessmen and celebrities. After studying the topography, he planned to strike on January 15 night,” said police.
At midnight on January 16, Shariful arrived at Bandra railway station and chose to walk rather than use public transport, he told police. He walked through several bylanes to avoid being captured on CCTV cameras.
He finally reached the Satguru Sharan building where Khan lives with his actress-wife Kareena Kapoor Khan and family. Shariful told cops he found it plush and decided to strike.
He reportedly entered the building by jumping over a four-feet boundary wall of an adjacent building. The watchman of the building was snoozing and there were no CCTV cameras on the premises to capture his entry.
The police said Shariful used a ladder lying in the building premises to climb 12 feet to reach a duct, from where he climbed to the actor’s home using a pipeline. He was allegedly captured on a CCTV camera climbing a stairwell to the actor’s home and while fleeing after the attack.
How he was tracked down
Despite him being captured on camera, the police had little to go by. DCP (Zone IX) Dikshit Gedam said that Shariful had illegally entered the country before reaching Mumbai.
“He was in Mumbai and Thane for the last six months and has used different names,” Gedam said.
“He was in urgent need of money and planned to rob anyone and escape to Bangladesh,’’ said another officer.
A police team scanned CCTV footage from nearly 500 cameras to track the attacker’s movements and one of the clearest markers in identifying the unknown suspect was the colour and pattern of his shoes.
On January 17, police got a tip-off from the owner of a manpower supply agency, sources said. Jitendra Pandey had provided a housekeeping job to the accused in a restaurant at Worli and later in Thane without verifying his antecedents.
A team of investigators went through footage from cameras starting from the actor’s building, going towards Linking Road and Bandra station, then Dadar and Worli before tracking the attacker to Thane.
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.
“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 Jan 16. There he walked till he reached Worli-Koliwada and stayed in a room where the pub staff hired by Pandey stayed,” an official said.
On January 17, in the afternoon Shariful allegedly left Worli and reached Thane. Intelligence units tracked his mobile tower location to the creek shore near Waghbil village and the search focused on marshy terrain behind a labour colony near a Metro casting yard.
On the night of January 18, security personnel established a cordon while search teams methodically checked every possible hiding spot. Workers at the labour camp were lined up for identification, and their mobile devices were examined for any communication with the suspect.
The final phase of the operation unfolded in a narrow lane adjacent to the labour camp, where dense vegetation and mangroves provided numerous potential hiding spots.
By 2 am, police personnel had scanned 30-40 acres of land comprising nullahs and thorny bushes with no success. Finally, the breakthrough came when a member of the search team shone a torch on some bushes.
“The accused was discovered hiding in extremely challenging conditions, concealed under grass and dried leaves in pitch darkness,” said an officer.
An exhausted Shariful offered no resistance as he was nabbed and taken to Mumbai.
Fired from an earlier job for theft
Shariful had taken on the identity of Bijoy Das after coming to Mumbai in 2024 and sought employment with a manpower agency. Pandey allegedly hired Shariful despite him not having documents like an Aadhaar card. Shariful claimed he had lost the documents the manpower agency wanted.
Police found a birth certificate, nationality card and family contact details stored on his phone.
Shariful initially worked at Slink & Bardot, a fine dining restaurant and pub in Worli, and then at Blabbering All Day, a hotel in Thane, as housekeeping staff. He was sacked from the Worli outlet in August 2024.
The general manager of Slink & Bardot said the establishment had sacked Shariful over an alleged case of theft.
Following police inquiries about Shariful on Saturday, the Worli pub dismissed its entire housekeeping staff. It also terminated housekeeping manpower supplier Pandey’s contract on discovering he had allowed Shariful to remain in staff accommodation despite being dismissed.
The general manager of Blabber All Day in Thane confirmed that Shariful had worked as a housekeeping staff member at the hotel from September to December.
The hotel subsequently changed its vendor responsible for providing housekeeping staff. There were no complaints against Shariful from colleagues or guests.
It was when he lost work at the Thane hotel that Shariful is believed to have started planning a burglary.
Why he was remanded to five days of custody
On Sunday afternoon, he was produced in a magistrate’s court, where he was remanded to police custody for five days. Joint Commissioner of Police (Law & Order) Satyanarayan Chaudhari said police have invoked the Foreigners’ Act, 1946, and Foreigners’ Order, 1948 for illegal entry, alongside Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections for armed robbery against Shariful.
The court observed that a “conspiracy of international level” was not impossible as Shariful was a Bangladeshi national.
The public prosecutor said the police were yet to recover a part of the weapon used for the attack on the actor at his residence on January 16.
“The accused had stabbed the actor with a knife which broke into three parts. A part of the blade was recovered from the actor’s house, while another was found from the actor’s body. The third portion remains with the accused and needs to be recovered,” the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor added that burglary might not have been the sole motive in the incident.
“The police need to probe if the stabbing was intentional. The accused was well prepared with a weapon. He knew in which area do celebrities live and the security arrangements. He has also demanded money at the actor’s residence. The police need to probe how long he was here, where he purchased the knife from and where he has hidden the missing portion,” the prosecutor said.
The prosecutor said the clothes worn by Shariful at the time of the stabbing need to be recovered.
“The police also need to find out if the accused had any associates who provided him with shelter or external support,” the prosecutor said.
Shariful’s lawyers, Dinesh Prajapati and Sandeep Sherkhane, argued that the arrest was illegal as no notice was served to their client and that he was made “a scapegoat”.
Reporting by V Narayan, Nitasha Natu, Nishikant Karlikar
