Jan. 28: Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahin, namumkin hai - the line made famous by Big B and revived by SRK - could well have been his. A man behind an inter-state extortion racket, with at least 27 cases against him, was arrested by Calcutta police from a Bihar hamlet on Friday night.
The city cops started tracking Dhananjay Pradhan, who managed to give police the slip by using SIM cards from Nepal, after a railway contractor who lives on Hungerford Street filed a complaint on January 14, alleging that he had received threat calls from Pradhan demanding Rs 2 crore.
Pradhan, 32, was arrested from Jogbani in Araria district of Bihar, near the Nepal border, where he had set up base since his last arrest - and subsequent release on bail - five years ago. He had been using SIM cards from Nepal to make extortion calls to Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar and Odisha, police said. Sources in the anti-rowdy squad of Lalbazar said they recovered a diary from Pradhan with names of businessmen, many of them from Calcutta, who could be his potential targets.
Pradhan, who hails from Ranchi, would introduce himself as Binod Singh while making the threat calls. He had allegedly made multiple extortion calls to Puneet Pathak, a railway contractor in Calcutta, in the last week of December and the first week of January, prompting him to report the matter to the police. Investigation revealed that the calls had been made using SIM cards bought in Nepal, Bihar and Jharkhand.
Sources said Pradhan was tracked down with the help of the phone numbers he used to make the calls. Although it was difficult to trace the details of the SIM card he had procured from Nepal, the phone numbers from Bihar and Jharkhand gave him away. "Two cell phones, SIM cards of India and Nepal, were recovered," said the additional commissioner of Calcutta police, Vishal Garg.
"Pradhan used SIM cards from Nepal and also Internet voice calling system that is more difficult to trace," said an officer. He was produced in court today and remanded in police custody till February 6.
