Mumbai: The shooter in the 2010 firing on Shiv Sena worker Sachin Sawant was arrested from Daman on Thursday by the Kurar police. Samarbahadur Mahabal Yadav, alias Pintu, had fled to Uttar Pradesh after firing at Sawant in 2010 at Kurar. Following Sawant’s murder this year, the Kurar police again started searching for the main shooter who had left for Daman. The man had got married, had two sons, and was working as a driver in Siyaram.
On June 29, 2010, Sawant, a resident of Ganesh Krupa chawl in Kandivali (east), was seated in his office when Yadav alias Pintu along with his aides barged into the office and shot at him with a country-made pistol. While Sawant (46) survived the incident, two men were arrested and three remained absconding. Two of them i.e. Karpu alias Karfusingh Dakhansingh and Bebu alias Jainendrasingh Ramkrupal Singh are still wanted.
After the murder attempt, the multi-crore slum rehabilitation project (SRA) slowed down. Till 2018 however, Sawant, who was spearheading the project, announced the bhoomi pujan ceremony, days after which he was shot dead near his residence on April 22. Suspecting that the accused in the 2010 case might be behind Sawant’s murder, the Kurar police started searching for Yadav.
When Yadav heard of Sawant’s murder, he, too, suspected that the police would come after him and subsequently, fled UP. Even as the Kurar police solved the murder case with the arrest of seven persons in May, they kept a lookout for Yadav. Acting on a tip-off, the police traced Yadav’s relative who gave them his new phone number.
A detection team led by API Gorakhnath Gharge and PSI Dhanesh Satardekar, under the guidance of DCP zone twelve, Vinay Rathod, tracked Yadav and nabbed him from Somnath in Daman where he worked as a driver.
