‘UP cop accused in 5-year-old robbery’

All of this actually happened on January 14,2004,in a private luxury bus on its way to Mumbai from Rajkot with 40 passengers on board. Five armed men boarded the busat the Kosamba junction in Surat. One of them put a pistol on the head of driver Ghanshyam Chauhan and asked him to keep driving,while the others got busy with the loot. They decamped with valuables worth Rs 83,000 at the Chikhli Crossroad in Navsari.

The next morning,Chauhan lodged a robbery complaint with the Kosamba police station in Surat. The Surat Rural Local Crime Branch started investigating the case. Meanwhile,the Kolkata police arrested two of the robbers,Arshad Mohammed Jaleel Ahmed and Bismilla Khan Aliraza Khan,and handed them over to Surat police. A third accused,Zunna Harun Rashid,was also arrested. All three were from Bihar.

It was then that the trio allegedly told the Surat police that Diwan Aslam Khan,one of the two absconding men,had joined the police and was posted in the Sonbhadra police station in UP.

They said,after the incident,Aslam Khan had stayed with his relatives in Mumbai and then returned to his native village (Beyur) in Bihar. There,he came to know about a police recruitment drive at the Sonbhadra police centre and was joined UP Police a year year after the Surat incident.

A Surat police team left for UP in August 2006 and contacted the Sonbhadra police station for Aslam. “We were shocked to find Khan in police uniform. We had his photograph,which we got from those arrested,and it fully matched,” said a senior member of the team.

LCB Inspector R V Rabari,who had led the team,said they could not arrest him as the UP police did not cooperate. “We failed to get any support from them and had to return. They also paid no heed to the arrest warrant for Khan issued in Gujarat,” he said.

Meanwhile,Amitabh Yash,Senior Superintendent of Police (STF),Lucknow,said he checked this,and the Superintendent of Police (Rural) in Lucknow,K G Tripathi,had reported to him that there is no case pending against the person wanted by the Surat police.

Lucknow police insist that the man with them is Aslam Ansarul Khan and not Diwan Aslam Khan.

Aslam Ansarul Khan had joined the UP Police in 2005,they said.

The Surat police,however,are far from convinced and suspect that Aslam Ansarul Khan may have identified himself as Diwan Aslam Khan to the fellow accused. The other possibility they claim is that the accused joined the police services on a fake name

The Surat police admit that they do not have any hard evidence to prove that Diwan Aslam Khan is indeed the UP STF man Aslam Ansarul Khan.

“We are working on it and will soon send a police team to Bihar to verify Ansarul Khan’s bonafides,” said Inspector BA Sharma of the Surat Crime Branch.