INDIA- With the accused in the Saif Ali Khan attack case yet to be arrested, Mumbai police officers blame a lack of coordination and sharing of information in the initial hours after the crime came to light.
In an embarrassment to the Bandra police in Mumbai, CCTV footage has now revealed that the man who attacked actor Saif Ali Khan at his Bandra residence early on Thursday was in the vicinity for nearly six hours after the incident.
A CCTV grab shows that the accused was at Bandra railway station at 8 am. The Bandra railway station is just 1.6 km from Satguru Sharan building, where Khan stays with his family, in Bandra (West).
A police officer said that the initial hours after a crime are critical to an investigation and if the image of the accused had been circulated among the railway police, the Crime Branch, and other police teams immediately, there was a greater chance that he would have been arrested within the first few hours itself.
CCTV footage shows that the accused was in Dadar in central Mumbai, the next railway station after Bandra on the Fast line, till 9.30 am even as the police were scrambling to catch him. By the time his image was circulated among various police units, some officers suspect he may have gone into hiding.
More than 48 hours after the attack on Khan, the accused is yet to be arrested.
A police officer said that even if the local police were alerted about the incident two hours later and it took them two hours to get the footage, they should have had the accused’s image by 6 am. Had the image been circulated among railway police and other police staff, there was a higher probability of him being nabbed before getting the time to go into hiding, the officer added.
Within hours of the incident, the police had found CCTV footage where the accused can be seen entering the building and leaving. While going up, he had covered his face. Later, the police found a screen grab of the accused while he left the building. The police also found footage of him changing his shirt.
Despite this, the accused was spotted on CCTV, ambling into a mobile shop at Dadar at 9 am – nearly seven hours after the attack.
“The over 40,000-strong Mumbai police force has over 20 teams looking for him now. However, all teams, including local police and Crime Branch teams, want to nab the accused first. This can lead to them working at cross purposes. At least in such a sensitive and high-profile case, the priority should have been to share all possible information with all police units so that the accused could be nabbed soon. A failure to do so may have cost the police,” a senior officer said.
YAllA TV – www.yallatv.ae
