Suspect had been detained in January

GRANT ROAD MURDERS

Mateen Hafeez I TNN

Mumbai: Abdul Salam A h i y ya Shaikh, the suspect in four murder and one att e m p t - t o - murder cases, was detained by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the south Mumbai serial killings two months ago. However, the SIT gave Shaikh a clean chit and released him.

Shaikh, 25, who hails from Vardhaman Nagar, West Bengal, has been booked in one murder.
Police sources said bookings in the other three will follow. These cases are separate from the seven south Mumbai murders that Ravindra Kantrulu, who is alleged to be a serial killer, is a suspect in. Shaikh has been booked for killing a youth, whose body was found on February 25 with at least half-a-dozen injuries near the railway tracks at Grant Road station.

Four days later, a 20-yearold migrant from Lucknow, Raju Pappu Gupta, was stabbed by an unidentified man near the tracks at Grant Road, but he survived. The next day, the D B Marg police picked up Shaikh from near the Baba Bahauddin dargah next to Bombay Hospital.

Shaikh, a Class IV dropout, came to Mumbai in 1999 for a job. He visited the dargah near Bombay Hospital and used to have the free food distributed to the poor there. Kantrulu was also a frequent visitor to the dargah. Later, Shaikh worked for a catering company on a temporary basis. However, this job had no steady income as he would be called only when there was any order to cook for a wedding. He then started hanging out with drug addicts near the dargah and started doing drugs.

“He has not admitted his involvement in the crime. We arrested him on the basis of an eyewitness’s statement. He will be booked in three other murder cases,’’ said an officer from the D B Marg police station. The other cases include the murder of an unidentified man in his early 30s who was found dead near the railway tracks on January 13, and the
murder of a man in his mid-20s whose decomposed body was found in a nullah with stab injuries. BMC sweepers found the body while cleaning the nullah near Grant Road.

The third case is the murder of a drug addict, whose body was found on the premises of a school adjacent to Grant Road railway tracks on July 7, 2006. The body had at least 18 stab injuries.

The SIT, while probing the seven south Mumbai killings, had picked up over 250 drug addicts, including Shaikh, in January. All of them had been subsequently released. Shaikh had been detained for two days. Finally, on February 6, the SIT booked Kantrulu in one of the seven murders.

mateen.hafeez@timesgroup.com

The Times of india, March 5, 2007