MUMBAI: The Bangladeshi national arrested for breaking into actor Saif Ali Khan’s home and stabbing him was driven to crime because of extreme poverty, police said.
“He chose Saif’s residence randomly… Shariful lost a housekeeping job at a Thane restaurant on Dec 15 when its contract with the manpower agency owned by Jitendra Pandey ended. He found himself nearly penniless. He said as much,” said an officer.
Before joining the Thane restaurant in September last year, Shariful worked at a Worli restaurant, earning Rs 13,000 a month. He told the police during his interrogation that from this sum, he would send Rs 12,000 to Bangladesh for his mother’s medical treatment, keeping only Rs 1,000 for himself. One day in Aug, the restaurant management caught him stealing and terminated his employment. Having studied only till Class 2, he found another menial job at the Thane restaurant. “After he lost this job too, this time for no fault of his, he decided on planning a burglary.
Shariful entered India by crossing Dawki river on the India-Bangladesh border at Meghalaya, paying Rs10,000 to an agent to have him taken to Assam. “The agent helped him board a bus to Kolkata, where he stayed for three days before taking a train to Mumbai in May. The agent also helped him get a SIM card. Once in Mumbai, he wandered aimlessly for three days, living on the roadside. He got in touch with Pandey through another person and got the Worli restaurant job in June,” the officer said. Police are on the trail of the agent.
After losing his second job in the city, Shariful decided on committing a burglary, and surveyed locations across the ritzy parts of Bandra and Khar on Dec 31 and Jan 1. Police said that before the attack on Saif, Shariful walked 90 minutes to Bandra in the intervening night of Jan 15-16. “He carried housebreaking tools like a screwdriver, hammer, and hacksaw blade, which he had bought a few days prior. The knife he later used to attack the actor, he had stolen from the Thane restaurant where he used to work,” said an officer. “After the crime, he was in Bandra-Khar for hours before taking a train to Dadar. He was unaware till then that he had stabbed a famous film actor. He told us during questioning that his attack on Saif was unplanned.”
The police tracked Shariful after Jitendra Pandey provided his Worli location and phone number. “We found that he had used an e-wallet to pay Rs 6 for a cup of tea in Worli. His last location was traced to a labour camp in Thane. We found he had also paid Rs 60 for a plate of bhurji pav on Jan 18,” said an officer.
The police learnt during Shariful’s questioning that he was a fan of Shah Rukh Khan and had tried to scale the walls of the actor’s Bandra bungalow Mannat to get a dekko at the “superstar” before the Saif incident. “He said his friends and family members often told him that he looked like Shah Rukh Khan. That would puff him up,” the officer said.
Police have seized Shariful’s cellphone, cap, scarf and the shirt he changed after the crime. The items have been sent to the forensics lab. But police are yet to recover the missing portion of the knife used to attack Saif.
