NIA arrests former encounter specialist cop Pradeep Sharma in Antillia bomb scare case

Mumbai: Former Mumbai encounter specialist Pradeep Sharma was arrested on Thursday by the NIA in connection with Antillia bomb scare case.

Mr Sharma, whose Mumbai residence was raided in the morning, was question by the central agency. The NIA has also seized some documents and electronic documents from his home.

His questioning occurred after an arrested suspect Santosh Shelar named Sharma and his two associates who are also linked to the Lakhan Bhaiyya case, as per sources.Mr Sharma will be shortly produced before the NIA court

Sharma was earlier interrogated by the NIA a couple of times last April.Last week, the NIA had arrested two other persons Santosh Atmaram Shelar and Anand Pandurang Jadhav, both from a slum pocket in Kurar village of Malad east for their roles in the twin cases.

Police sources said that after their custodial interrogation more details of Sharma emerged and culminated in today’s action.Earlier, the NIA had arrested five other persons including former cops like Sachin Vaze, Riyazuddin Kazi, Sunil Mane, a convicted ex-cop Vinayak Shinde and cricket bookie Naresh Gor.

Sharma is reported to be close to Vaze, who is named as one of the prime accused in the SUV-Hiren cases.

The duo had allegedly met in early March when the plot to eliminate Hiren was hatched while Sharma had gone to the Mumbai Police Commissionerate to meet some other persons.

A former college professor-turned-policeman of the 1983 batch state cadre, he built up a formidable reputation for wiping out the Mumbai mafia through the so-called ‘encounter killings.'

However, Sharma was dismissed from the police force in 2008 for alleged links with the underworld but was reinstated after 10 years when the charges against him failed.

He started his second innings with a bang by arresting Iqbal Ibrahim Kaskar - the younger sibling of absconding mafia don Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar – in September 2017 on extortion charges.

In 2019, he quit the police force to join the Shiv Sena and contested the assembly elections unsuccessfully from Nalasopara constituency in Palghar.(UNI)