After being served non-vegetarian pizza instead of a vegetarian one, a 26-year-old-man demanded Rs 1 crore as compensation and threatened to defame the pizza store if he was not paid the money. On a complaint by the store owner, the accused was arrested on Thursday and produced in front of a metropolitan magistrate court on Friday.
On April 4, the accused Anil Kishor Kumar Jha, had placed an order for a few vegetarian and non-vegetarian pizzas at a store in Mahavir Nagar, Kandivali (west). The boxes, however, were not labelled and so Jha, a vegetarian, had allegedly consumed the non-vegetarian pizza by mistake. According to the information shared by the police, Jha then called up the pizza store after a couple of days and blamed them for having destroyed his religious custom.
To make up for this blunder by the store, Jha demanded Rs 1 crore from them.
Police sources said that in order to resolve the matter, the pizza store owner brought in a Prashant Tambe as a mediator. Mr Tambe negotiated with Jha and brought the compensation amount down to Rs 10 lakh.
Meanwhile, along with the store owner, Mr Tambe approached the Kandivali police who asked them to lure Jha on the pretext of giving him the first instalment of the compensation money.
On Thursday evening when Jha went to Mahavir Nagar to receive the first instalment of Rs 25,000 a special team of Kandivali police nabbed him and charged him under various sections of the Indian Penal Code for extortion.
