Mumbai: The Mumbai police on Sunday arrested a Bangladeshi man for allegedly stabbing actor Saif Ali Khan at his Bandra residence three days back during a prima facie burglary bid and interrogating him to unravel “international conspiracy”, if any.
The preliminary investigation suggests that the man was unaware that he had entered a Bollywood star’s house and his intention was theft, a senior police official told reporters.
A court remanded the accused, Shariful Islam Shehzad Mohammad Rohilla Amin Fakir (30), in five-day police custody after observing that the police’s contention of an international conspiracy cannot be ruled out.
The breakthrough came in the early morning hours when the police traced Shehzad to a labour camp in a forested area in Thane based on the information provided by a labour contractor.
Multiple teams of the police and the crime branch worked on several inputs and analysed footage from several CCTV cameras in the last three days to track down Khan’s attacker.
The probe saw the police picking up two lookalikes of a suspect captured in a CCTV grab of Khan’s building in the last two days for questioning.
The accused, later identified as Shehzad, was seen outside the Dadar railway station three times from where he went to Worli Koliwada, the police officer said citing the investigation.
“The police examined hundreds of CCTV footage and found out that the attacker had visited a labour contractor in the area,” he said.
He said the labour contractor gave the police details about the attacker, and based on his direction, the police traced him to a labour camp in a forested area in Thane around 2:30-3 am.
Shehzad was nabbed at Hiranandani Estate on Ghodbandar Road.
The police officer said Shehzad had changed his name to Vijay Das after entering India illegally from Bangladesh.
The police told the court that the accused was a Bangladeshi national and they needed to find the real motive behind attacking the actor.
The police also told the court they needed to find out if there was an international conspiracy linked to the case.
Accepting the police’s contention after perusing documents on record, the court said the prosecution’s submission of international conspiracy “cannot be said to be impossible”.
However, defence lawyer Sandeep D Sherkhane contended his client was residing in the country for several years and has vital documents (for staying in the country) and that his family is also living in India.
The case has been hyped because of the presence of actor Saif Ali Khan, the defence lawyer further submitted.
As per the preliminary probe, Shehzad sneaked into the Bollywood star’s apartment, in the Satguru Sharan building in Bandra, in the early hours of January 16 with the intention of theft, the police had said.
Khan (54) was stabbed multiple times in the attack, after which he underwent a five-hour surgery at nearby Lilavati Hospital.
Preliminary investigation suggests that Shehzad climbed the stairs to the seventh-eighth floor of the building where Khan and his actor wife Kareena Kapoor live with their children and domestic staff.
