Man booked for sending cops on wild goose chase

After false information about terrorist activity at Dagadusheth temple sent the the city police, railway police and the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) on a wild goose chase, officials of the Bundgarden police station registered a non-cognisable offence against 24-year-old Imran Shaikh Mehmood Qureshi, a resident of Dapodi.

False alarm: Heavy police bandobast outside the Dagdusheth Halwai Ganapati temple in Mandai yesterday.

Joint Commissioner of Police Sanjeev Kumar Singhal said a case was registered against Qureshi under Section 182 (false information) and 505 (mischief) of the Indian Penal Code.

Qureshi hails from Mangaroolpir in Washim district and works at a scrap centre in Khadki. After the GRP officials found him injured at the Daund railway station on Friday night, he claimed that had claimed that two Pakistani nationals had assaulted him for rejecting their offer to plant a bomb at Dagdusheth Halwai Ganapati temple in Mandai. He also claimed that the two people had offered him Rs 20,000 for the job.

Following Qureshi's revelation, the entire temple area was cordoned off for more than eight hours and intensive search was conducted on Saturday to unearth suspicious object, but nothing was found.

During interrogation at Sassoon hospital, where he was rushed for treatment, police officials found discrepancies in Qureshi's statement and discovered that the two people about whom he was talking were actually scrap dealers from Khadai who had thrashed him.

Qureshi cooked up the story to implicate the duo, so that he could avenge his beating. An official from the Crime Branch said that Qureshi'su00a0sister had told the police that he had this habit of blabbering irrelevant things and requested them not to pay heed to any of his nonsense.

He also said that Qureshi was under the influence of alcohol when he was brought to the hospital and was speaking in a vague manner.