BENGALURU: The Central Crime Branch (CCB) will start investigating the dreaded 52-year-old gangster Ravi Poojari with the 1st ACMM court handing him over to their custody till March 7 in connection with the double murder which took place on February 15, 2007 in Tilaknagar.
Sources confirmed that the focus would be on Poojari’s alleged political connections in Karnataka and Maharashtra.
Meanwhile, ADGP Amar Kumar Pandey and Joint Commissioner of Police Sandeep Patil held a press conference and disclosed that Poojari was holed up in Burkina Faso, a West African country for 12 years. He was into textiles and the electronic goods industry. He had also opened a hotel named ‘Maharaja’ in Senegal. He was brought to Bengaluru in the early hours of Monday by a police team.
He possessed a Burkina Faso passport and was arrested in Dakar, the capital of Senegal on January 19, 2019. Poojari had changed his name to Anthony Fernandez and was also known as Rocky Fernandez.
He had gone missing in 1994 after obtaining bail in a murder case in Mumbai. Since, then, he has travelled in 12 countries and ran industries. Tanveer Sait, former minister and present Congress MLA from Mysuru, who received an extortion call from Poojari when he was a minister, said that many legislators had been threatened by him. As many as 42 criminal cases have been lodged against him in Bengaluru. 32 cases in Mangaluru and 11 cases in Udupi.
