The Mumbai police arrested Lalit Patil, who was behind the multi-crore mephedrone racket busted by the Pimpri-Chinchwad police in 2020, from Chennai on Tuesday night, days after he escaped from Pune’s Sassoon General Hospital.
A senior IPS officer from Mumbai police confirmed to The Indian Express that Patil had been arrested by a team of Sakinaka police from Chennai on Tuesday. He is being brought to Mumbai.
Lalit, who had been in judicial custody since 2020, had escaped on October 2 from Sassoon General Hospital while he was lodged there for treatment.
Earlier this month, the Sakinaka police, under the supervision of Joint Commissioner of Police (Law and Order) Satyanarayan Chaudhary and DCP Zone X, Datta Nalawade, raided a factory in the MIDC area of Nashik early this month and seized huge amounts of drugs. The said factory is believed to be owned by Bhushan Patil, the brother of Lalit Patil.
Phone call
According to police sources, a phone call led to Lalit’s arrest.
After the drug bust in Nashik, the Mumbai police had not revealed the name of a key person who was arrested along with other main members of the racket. As Lalit didn’t see the name of this gang member in news reports among those arrested after the drug seizure, he thought the said member had managed to dodge the police.
Recently, Lalit called this person from an unknown number, while the person was still in the police’s custody. The police made the accused speak to Lalit so that they could trace his location. The accused spoke to Lalit and did not give out that he was under police custody.
Later, while tracking this phone number, a team of Sakinaka police arrested Lalit from Chennai. Further probe revealed that after escaping from Pune, Lalit first went to Gujarat and then to Karnataka in a rented car. Later, he moved to Chennai and kept changing his location to dodge the police, an officer said.
Escape from hospital
After his arrest by the Pimpri Chinchwad police in December 2020, Lalit was lodged in the Yerwada Central Prison. In June, he was admitted to the Sassoon Hospital for treatment of a hernia and tuberculosis. On October 2, a day before his surgery for hernia was scheduled, Lalit escaped from the hospital.
The probe by Pune police revealed that Lalit, who was under treatment at ward number 16 of the Sassoon Hospital, allegedly supplied contraband to his aide Subhash Janaki Mandal through Rauf Rahim Shaikh, a worker at the hospital canteen.
On September 30, the Pune city police arrested Mandal near Sassoon Hospital with over 1.71 kg of mephedrone worth Rs 2.14 crore.
The police then seized two iPhones, each worth Rs 1.1 lakh, from Lalit during a search at the hospital ward. An FIR was lodged against Patil, Mandal, and Shaikh at Bundgarden police station under the NDPS Act.
Lalit’s brother Bhushan Patil and his aide Abhishek Balkawade were also named as accused in the September 30 drug seizure case following an initial investigation.
On October 10, the Crime Branch of Pune City Police, in a joint operation with the Special Task Force (STF) of Uttar Pradesh Police, arrested Bhushan and Abhishek from a place near the Nepal border.
The probe following their arrest revealed that Lalit, Bhushan, and Abhishek together ran the mephedrone manufacturing unit in Nashik, which was busted by Mumbai police.
Vijay Kumar YadavVijay Kumar Yadav, is a Special Correspondent with 15 years of experie… read more
