After a five-month chase, the Aurangabad police has managed to arrest three accused who had allegedly lured Palash Balsetwar (20), a deck cadet who lost his life when his ship sank on March 15 near Ir
After a five-month chase, the Aurangabad police has managed to arrest three accused who had allegedly lured Palash Balsetwar (20), a deck cadet who lost his life when his ship sank on March 15 near Iran.
The three accused are said to be recruiting agents who lured Palash with a job in the ship. M.V. Mashhour, the cargo ship in which Palash was working, was illegally operating in the waters of Iran and was found to be a junk ship.
Aurangabad police commissioner Amitesh Kumar confirmed that the arrests were made late last week. The accused were produced in Aurangabad metropolitan court and granted 14 days police custody earlier this week.
The three accused, identified as Sanjeev Kumar, Sudhakar Tayde and Vikas Kadam were frequently changing their locations and were finally arrested by the Aurangabad police in Mumbai and Nashik. The trio were booked under sections 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code along with Section 12 (1A) in The Passports Act, 1967.
“The court remanded the three to police custody for 14 days. Out of the three, one accused, namely Kumar, was arrested from Nashik and the other two in Mumbai. A team of Aurangabad police visited both the cities where we took help from the local police officials,” said a police official.
The Asian Age had reported in March this year on how the bereaved family of Palash from Aurangabad had contacted the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj over the delay in bringing back their son’s body from Iran to India.
M.V. Mashhour, the cargo ship, is said to have been built way back in 1986.
When the ship met with an accident late on the night of March 15, it had seven members onboard. All evacuated it successfully, except Palash.
In October 2015, Palash saw an advertisement in a local Aurangabad newspaper after which he had approached the arrested agents in Nashik. Palash’s father Datta Balsetwar had also given the trio around Rs 6 lakh in order to secure the job. He later sent Palash to Iran for working in a ship in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Mr Balsetwar has demanded that the police also book the company owners of the arrested accused under whose name the illegal business of recruiting took place.
