Man posing as policeman takes bribe, held in Chennai

Chennai: Police on Thursday arrested a 28-year-old impostor who posed as a policeman and collected bribe from several vendors across the city. M Ashok, a native of NGO colony in Coimbatore, is a class 10 drop out and had dreams of joining the police department. Since, his dreams couldn’t fructify, he took the matters in his own hands.

Police sources said that he had managed to loiter around with a sub-inspector uniform for little over one month until he was caught on Thursday. Ashok had reached Chennai on January 15 this year and checked into a lodge on Mayor Chittibabu street in Triplicane.

He then got himself two sets of police sub-inspector uniform stitched from a shop in Periamet and was roaming around in a two-wheeler with ‘police’ sticker on the vehicle. He introduced himself as SI Ashok Pandian to hawkers and shopkeepers in Zam bazaar area near Triplicane. The public too didn’t find him fishy as he was built like a cop. Intelligence sources who eventually got wind of it alerted Zam Bazaar police who intercepted the impostor on Thursday.

He was detained and during investigations, it was found that he has been doing this for a month now. Police sources said that he managed to collect '65,000 as bribe from gullible vendors in the past one-month. Apart from Triplicane, he had also roamed around in other parts of the city too with the uniform, police said. Zam Bazaar police arrested him.