Criminals operating from remote jails

KATHMANDU, March 14: Shifting a notorious criminal to a remote jail may do little to discourage him from masterminding crimes from behind the bars.

Udaya Shetty, an Indian criminal convicted of kidnappings, and Avishek Giri, a political-activist-turned-murderer, were shifted together to a jail in Nuwakot from the Dillibazzar Sadarkhor Jail over a month ago after their bloody brawl with fellow inmates. But the new cell turned into a rendezvous where their partnership flourished into an international extortion racket.

Police has restricted the jailbirds´ activities after finding that they had been extorting top businessmen in the capital using their channels in the East-Asian countries.


An intensive investigation undertaken by Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) has found Shetty and Giri at the centre of a ring that appeared to have been threatening businessmen with phone calls from Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand and ripping them off through agents in the capital.

The revelation came after CIB officials recently arrested one Sunil Lama, the point man of the Shetty-Giri racket, in course of cracking some major extortion cases.
Lama´s arrest led to a raid at the Nuwakot jail that unveiled insidious plots to terrorize and extort businesspersons. “We think a lot of victims are yet to file their complaints,” said CIB chief and Deputy Inspector General (DIG) Rajendra Singh Bhandari.

“The arrest also bared a new Modus Operandi of creating high-degree terror with calls from foreign lands,” added Bhandari.

Investigative officials said Shetty and Giri had comfortably used cell phones in jail to coordinate with their racket members.

“We have received no reports if the businessmen paid them,” Bhandari said. “But the jailbirds must have accumulated a large amount by now. Investigations will also deal with this part.”

Officials said that the decision of shifting dangerous prisoners like Shetty and Giri to a lowly and remote facility was unwise. “Lodging inmates serving sentences for heinous crimes need to be considered from the view-point of threats they pose,” officials said.

Shetty, who even gained notoriety in India for extortions before sneaking into Nepal, was arrested two years ago on the charge of kidnapping Niraj Kakchhapati. His group had released the 12th grader after being paid a ransom of five million rupees. It was his first independent attempt on kidnapping after he parted with Amar Tandon, another Indian criminal who is now in the Central Jail.

Giri was involved in party politics in his hometown Biratnagar before perpetrating a couple of murders and shootings. He was arrested one-and-a-half-year ago.

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