Stolen Audi leads cops to MBA thief

NEW DELHI: An Audi Q7 stolen from the Holiday Inn hotel at Aerocity near Indira Gandhi International Airport was recovered by the Crime Branch, unearthing in the process a unique case of high-end cars being slipped past unsuspecting valets at luxury hotels and then sold for use mostly in drug running.
Having nabbed the thief, Satyendra Singh Shekhawat, an MBA graduate, the cops claimed on Wednesday to have solved eight recent cases of car thefts.
“Shekhawat would be dressed in a suit and pretend to be in a conversation with a client as he did a recce of the hotel parking,” revealed Ravindra Yadav, joint commissioner (crime). “He would pick up a key from the key hanger after distracting the valet in a conversation and then walk around the parking lot pressing the remote key to locate the car before driving off with it.”
In the current case, on August 26, Arjun Garg went for dinner to Holiday Inn and handed over his car to the parking attendant. Later, he was surprised to be told that someone had taken away his Audi. On scanning the CCTV footage, a person was seen talking on a mobile phone near the valet parking desk and surreptitiously spiriting away the car key.
“During investigation, police realised that there were several instances of such thefts carried out using the same modus operandi in several cities, including Gurgaon, Pune and Mumbai,” said Bhisham Singh, DCP (Crime). “A team led by ACP Sanjay Sehrawat and inspector Sunil from the Inter-State Cell of Delhi Police worked on this important clue.”
The team followed some leads and scrutinised CCTV footage from five-star hotels and highway toll plazas, before zeroing in on Shekhawat from Jaipur, Rajasthan. On September 12, police got information that Shekhawat would approach another luxury hotel in Delhi for his nefarious purpose. The audacious car-lifter was intercepted in an Audi car with a Maharashtra registration plate. The car turned out to be Garg’s.
“During interrogation, Shekhawat admitted that he had earlier been arrested by the police of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan for theft, robbery and assault,” said Yadav. “In February, after his release from Jodhpur jail, he again started stealing high-end vehicles. He sold the cars to people who used them to transport narcotic substances from Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh in the belief that police or law agencies seldom checked luxury vehicles.”