Sachin Waze Case: NIA summons bar owners, grills for hours

Restaurant and bar owners claim that the hafta collection had started soon after businesses resumed after the lockdown. File pic

The National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is probing the Antilia bomb scare case, summoned a few bar owners from the city, and they were grilled for hours at their Peddar Road office. They were summoned after their numbers reflected in the call data records (CDRs) of API Sachin Waze, who is in under their custody. An NIA officer confirmed to mid-day and said, "Yes, we had summoned a few bar owners for questioning few days ago. Whatever is required for investigation in this case, we are doing."

The fiasco over the Antilia bomb scare case led to the arrest of Waze. Additionally, the then Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh was transferred from his post. A day after getting shunted out of the coveted post, the serving IPS officer Singh wrote an eight-page letter to the chief minister and accused home minister Anil Deshmukh of being involved in the malpractices.

In our cover-page story published on March 22, sources from the Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association (AHAR) had told us how Waze - who is now suspended after his arrest, had started collecting money from them two months before Deshmukh made the alleged demands to "collect money from 1,750 establishments in Mumbai".

Waze, in connivance with Social Service Branch (SSB) of the Mumbai police, had reportedly been collecting money from the establishments-divided into three categories A, B and C, from December 2020, for the fear of impending police crackdown.

The suspended policeman Waze, who was made in-charge of an elite Crime Intelligence Unit (CIU) of Crime Branch, would call the hotel and bar owners at his office inside the Commissioner of Police compound at Crawford Market to press his demands to allegedly "extort" money, said a bar owner. However, the president of AHAR Shivanand Shetty said, "We would not like to comment on an issue, which we are not aware of, as the same is not brought to our notice by any of our members till date."

"We would like to add that being a responsible organisation, complaints of harassment if any, are immediately addressed through a proper representation to the respective government departments for redressal. We would also like to state, that not a single complaint pertaining to the above instances of extortion is registered in our association," Shetty, added. The murky developments led to a man named Mansukh Hiral, the purported owner of explosives-laden Scorpio, losing his life.

The car was found abandoned near industrialist Mukesh Ambani's residence in south Mumbai. Waze is in the custody of the NIA who is also probing the murder case of Hiran. When Waze was produced before the NIA special court on March 25, he told judge Prashant Sitre that he has been made a "scapegoat" in this case and he has nothing to do with the matter. However, the NIA officer we spoke to claims to have collected all the vital pieces of evidence related to profile matter. "We have recorded the statement of more than 35 people and collected CCTV camera footage totalling 112 TB," the NIA officer said.