Who valued the infamous ruby at Rs 6 crore? The query was answered on Tuesday with the ruby’s owner Samir Jagot and his friend, Gopal Haryani, confessing to forging documents of the stone’s worth. Meanwhile, the ‘gem’ was being sent to Directorate of Forensic Science in Gandhinagar till the reports last came in.The duo was arrested charged under Section 471 of the IPC for passing off a forged document as a genuine one. Vadodara police, on Tuesday, had summoned a representative of Chunilal and Co Jewellers, who according to Jagot and Haryani, had valued the ruby at Rs 6 crore and even had a signed document as proof. However, Assistant Commissioner of Police, T R Parmar said that Pankaj Parekh, from Chunilal and Co Jewellers in Mumbai, denied they ever valued the ruby or even signed the document that Jagot and Haryani possessed. “Pataliya and the others were handed this forged document by Jagot and Haryani and then asked to take the ruby to Jaipur to either find a buyer or get it valued at a higher rate,” Parmar said. He added that it was the Rs 6 crore tag the ruby had which prompted Pataliya to murder the brothers Darshan and Mihir Thakkar and Balkrishna Patel so he could sell the ruby and keep the money himself. The saga began on December 6 when Pataliya, Mihir and Darshan Thakkar and Balkrishna Patel set out from Vadodara to Jaipur to get the stone valued. However, the four went missing after a couple of days and the Vadodara police began investigation. However, the police got their first break on February 6 when they arrested Pataliya from Himmatnagar after setting a trap for him. The next day, Pataliya confessed to the police that he had murdered the other three for the ruby and had buried the bodies in Shehra in Panchmahals district. Then Pataliya denied knowing about where the ruby was. On February 9, Pataliya’s paramour Jyoti Shah surrendered to the police and also handed them the ruby. A retired geology professor R V Karanth’s opinion that the ruby was not very valuable, and was a low-quality stone had left the police baffled and they, till Tuesday, had not been able to fathom why Pataliya decided to commit the murders.
