1 day Ago
1 2 3 Surat: Video cassette recorders (VCRs) may have faded into obsolence, but a lovingly preserved marriage cassette helped law enforcement rewind three decades and nab a murder accused who was out of police reach for 28 years. The Navsari Local Crime Branch (LCB), which had no photograph of the fugitive, tracked down Pravin Sadhu , alias Prabhudas Sadhu, now 61, after identifying him in the marriage of his friend that took place way back in 1996 in Mahua town. The cops digitised the cassette and identified the accused's face.
He was finally found living under a new identity in Patan district's Shankheswhar, ironically as a temple priest Navsari district superintendent of police (DSP) Sushil Agrawal said: "Sadhu was 33 when he murdered one Paresh Solanki on April 4, 1998, in Gadat village of Navsari. He was arrested from Mahuva's Karchaliya village on April 13 and was lodged in Navsari jail on April 17. The court gave him interim bail and he was supposed to report to jail on May 10, 1998.
However, he jumped bail and was absconding since then." The LCB team located his friend whose marriage Sadhu attended in 1996. Based on a video cassette of the marriage, police obtained Sadhu's photo and nabbed him from a temple in Shankeshwar in Patan district.
LCB inspector DM Rathod told TOI: "We were working on the case for the last nine months after we got a tip-off that he visited his relative's home in Ahmedabad in July 2024. As Navsari jail and Gandevi police did not have his photo in records, it was challenging for us to know how he looked. During the investigation, we came to know that he worked with Gandevi's famous magician Mukesh Jadugar with his friend Dipak.
We learned that he was present at Dipak's marriage in 1996 and there is a video cassette of the wedding. We got the footage of Sadhu from the cassette." Initially, the police were apprehensive if the cassette would be in working condition.
However, they successfully converted the footage into a DVD. "We showed the footage to his acquaintances and learned that he was a priest in Varetha's Jayeshwar temple and stayed there for 10 years. From there, he fled to Shankheswar's Momai Mata temple after learning that police were on his trail.
" Cops dressed as priests, visited 200 temples Cops posed as priests, searched 200 temples. The LCB team, led by police inspector DM Rathod, posed as priests and visited around 200 temples in Mahisagar and Patan districts to locate the accused. During 28 years, Sadhu stayed in temples and ashrams of Maharashtra, UP, Rajasthan, and Bihar before settling as a priest in Mahisagar district's Varetha village temple.
.
