BENGALURU: While helping fight crime, a former police informer apparently couldn’t resist the temptation of becoming an extortionist himself and is now cooling his heels in prison after he was arrested by the Marathalli police for allegedly blackmailing an IT professional and his woman friend, who had checked into a hotel room that he was keeping an eye on. Mahendra Kumar, who worked with the Adugodi police for about four years, keeping an eye on the lodges and hotel rooms in Marathalli and Whitefield, allegedly barged into a hotel room that the software professional had checked into with his female friend, and began to blackmail him after taking a few picture of the two.
Going by the complainant, he forcibly took him and his woman friend to a nearby ATM and demanded a sum of Rs 50,000, but the techie could give him only Rs 20,000 as that was all he had. But his ordeal didn’t end there as soon afterwards he began to receive extortion calls from various numbers. Harassed beyond measure, he finally approached the Marat halli police to lodged a complaint on June 9. “It had become difficult to trace him as he was making calls from different mobile numbers belonging to tea vendors, push-cart pullers and others. But based on the CCTV footage and tip-offs received, we arrested him on June 18,” said Mr Sadiq Pasha, inspector, Marathalli.
Investigation revealed that Mahendra Kumar was involved in around 27 cases of extortion, robbery and mugging. According to a senior police officer, Sadiq Pasha, Mahendra kept an eye on small hotels, lodges and sometimes barged into them posing as a cop. “Mahendra would say something like his girlfriend or sister had been forcefully brought into the hotel room and raped. He would sometimes pose as president of the Kannada Sangh, a cop or journalist. The scared management would allow him to visit the room he was interested in and he would barge inside and later blackmail the couple occupying it,” he explained, adding that Mahendra had used similar tactics to bully the staff of Hotel Mapple Express in Whitefield and Marathalli.
