Bangladeshi Man Who Stabbed Saif Ali Khan Hid In Thane. How Cops Found Him
Mumbai:
Shariful Islam Shehzad, a Bangladeshi national who had illegally entered India and had been living under the false name Bijoy Das, has been arrested for allegedly breaking into actor Saif Ali Khan’s home and attacking him and his staff during a burglary attempt.
Police had formed 30 teams to track down the accused, who scanned CCTV footage of the building in Bandra where Saif Ali Khan, his wife and actor Kareena Kapoor Khan and their sons live. They noticed the suspect leaving the building after the attack which left the actor seriously injured. Police then scanned several hours of footage from across the city to locate the suspect. During this tenous exercise, they found footage captured by a CCTV camera in DN Nagar in Andheri. They saw the suspect getting off a bike and tracked down the two-wheeler using its number.
Parallelly, following local intelligence inputs, police zeroed in on a rented accommodation at Koliwada in Worli, where the accused lived with three others, sources in police said. A police team went to this accommodation and questioned the people living there. They managed to get the suspect’s name and related information. Police also got his phone number and used it to track his phone location.
The accused, police found, had been hiding in a thicket on a deserted road in Thane. Police first surrounded him from all sides and then took him into custody.
Police have said they did not find any Indian document from Shariful, but found evidence that establish he is a Bangladeshi national who crossed over illegally.
During questioning, Shariful told police that he saw his images on TV news after the incident and fled to Thane. He switched off his phone and hid near a labour camp in Thane. Police tracked down his phone’s last known location and reached Thane.
Shariful has claimed that he did not know that he was breaking into Saif Ali Khan’s home, a police officer said. Cops, however, suspect that he was out of work and planned to rob the actor’s home for a big haul.
The accused has told police that he used the rear staircase and air-conditioning ducts to get inside the building. He has also said it was the first time he had entered the building. Police have said they may recreate the scene with the accused.
The actor, meanwhile, is recovering well after he was rushed to Lilavati Hospital late on Wednesday night with six stab injuries, one of them near his spine.
What Happened That Night
In her statement to the police, Eliyama Philip, a nanny for Saif’s sons, said she was the first to spot the intruder. The 56-year-old said she was woken up by some noises around 2 a.m. She saw the bathroom door ajar and the light on and assumed that Kareena Kapoor Khan was checking in on her younger son Jahangir or Jeh.
“… then I went back to sleep but, again, I realised something was wrong. So I woke up again and saw a man come out of the bathroom and go into the boy’s room. I quickly got up and went to Jeh’s room. The attacker then put his finger near his mouth and said ‘Don’t make any noise, nobody will go out’ in Hindi,” Ms Philip said.
“When I rushed to pick up Jeh, the man, armed with a wooden stick and a long Hexa blade. ran towards me and tried attacking me, she said.
“I tried to block the attack by putting my hand forward, but the blade hit me near the wrists of both my hands and on the middle finger of my left hand,” she said.
“At that time, I asked him, ‘What do you want?’. He said, ‘I want money.’ I asked, ‘How much do you want?’ He said in English, ‘one crore’,” Ms Philip has said in her statement.
Hearing Ms Philip scream, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan rushed out of their room. When Mr Khan asked the intruder what he wanted, he attacked him with a wooden object and the hexa blade, Ms Philip said.
“Saif Sir somehow managed to get away from him and we all ran out of the room and pulled the door of the room,” she said, adding that everyone then went to the upper floor of their home. The intruder later escaped, she said.
