As application goes through, CBI approver Sachin Vaze sings like a canary

Mumbai: Criminal mastermind and disgraced policeman Sachin Vaze, is singing like the proverbial canary after his application to turn approver was accepted by a special CBI court. This has come about in the wake of Vaze providing specific details about two Maharashtra Ministers, Anil Deshmukh and Anil Parab to the investigation agency.

Vaze told the CBI that Parab was de facto running the Maharashtra Home Department, although former Home Minister (now incarcerated in an ED case) Deshmukh held charge of the portfolio.

While Vaze will still face conviction in the Mansukh Hiren murder case in the Antilla ‘terror’ case, his status as an approver may garner him a lighter sentence for cooperating with the central agency.

His accomplice in the criminal case, and former colleague Pradeep Sharma, who was charge-sheeted by the National Investigative Agency (NIA) for murdering Hiren following a phone call from Vaze, however, is unlikely to benefit from a lesser sentence as his efforts to turn approver have so far proved unsuccessful.

The case made international headlines on February 25, 2021, when a car containing 20 gelignite sticks was found outside the residence of top industrialist Mukesh Ambani in Mumbai. A note found inside the vehicle--addressed to Mukesh and his wife Nita Ambani--said the act was a prelude to more serious violence against their family.

The Indian Mujahideen and Jaish-ul-Hind linkages that emerged in the case turned out to be bogus and fictitious creations of Vaze and his cohorts, who had intended to sustain a widespread extortion racket within the Indian corporate sector by creating an illusion of involvement from international terrorist agencies.

The buzz is that similar efforts had been reported earlier in Mumbai city, where these notorious and socalled encounter specialists were found to be operating extortion rackets, even using the name of overseas gangsters to get Indian businessmen to cough up huge sums of money.

“The two years of COVID-19 meant that these high-energy encounter policemen were mostly bored and idle. As they say, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. So it was no surprise that they devised the plan to extort money from corporate India thinking their foolhardy enterprise would actually remain undetected,” a person privy to the developments said.