Fondness for beer, bar girls lands Ghatkopar ‘jewel thief’ in police net

Officials said when Solanki transferred Rs 50,000 to his mother’s account from a bank in Hiriyur in December this year, they sent a team to Hiriyur to try and locate him. “We took with us several pages of Call Data Records (CDRs) of his mother and sister, whom he had called from public telephones in Hiriyur. After completing inquiries with the bank, we chalked out an area within a three-kilometre radius of the bank. Dividing ourselves into sub teams, we started visiting public telephones within this radius. The plan was to widen the radius if this didn’t yield results,” said an officer.

Armed with the CDRs, the police dialed their own cellphone numbers from each public telephone in the radius, comparing the numbers of the public telephones to the numbers in the CDRs. After an entire day of dialing their own numbers, the police were able to find three phones in the area from which Solanki had called his mother and sister. The police then narrowed their search to the area between three such public phones.

“Inquiries in Mumbai had already established Solanki’s fondness for beer and visiting bars, and we started with beer bars in the area. However, we were impeded by barriers of language and familiarity, and hence enlisted the help of the local police. We showed Solanki’s photograph to several constables in Hiriyur, and one of them recognised him as a frequent visitor to one of the beer bars in the beat the he patrolled. He took us to the bar, told us to wait outside and used his rapport with the employees of the bar to glean further information about Solanki. When he came back, he told us that Solanki was almost a daily visitor and spent Rs 45,000-50,000 on the bar girls in the bar,” the officer said.

On January 5, the Mumbai police team picked up Solanki from near the bar. They then initiated inquiries into his movements since October and found that he was slowly getting comfortable in Hiriyur and was setting up a new life for himself. “After fleeing Mumbai with his wife and daughter, Solanki was on his way to Bangalore but had to get off his bus at Hiriyur as his daughter fell ill. When he took her to a local doctor, he met a man from his home state Rajasthan who runs a garments business in Hiriyur and decided to settle there. He took a one-room apartment on rent but soon moved into a one BHK. However, his daily drinking and spending money on bar girls led to fights between him and his wife, and she ultimately left him, along with their daughter, in December,” another officer said.

Solanki subsequently became even more of a spendthrift. He would melt gold by the kilo, sell it to goldsmiths and blow the money on beer and bar girls. The police said the unbridled debauchery established him firmly in the memory of waiters at the bar, which ultimately worked in the police’s favour when they came looking for him. Solanki was arrested for a similar crime by the Kurla police in 2013, has theft cases registered against him with the Panvel and Sanpada police, as well as a rape case registered with the NRI police station in Navi Mumbai.