Ajmera murder: Mastermind arrested after 10 months

The prime accused in the murder of Ajmera Group chairman Jayant Ajmera’s wife Chetna has been arrested in Rajasthan, taking the total number of arrests in the case to six.

Ashok Purohit, 32, was on the run for the past 10 months.

Chetna, wife of Ajmera Group chairman Jayant Ajmera, was murdered on May 7 last year. Crime branch sleuths had arrested three persons — Mahendra Rathod, Shyamlal Soni and Hemant Maneria — in the case.

“The crime branch has been chasing Purohit since the past 10 months. He hatched the murder conspiracy,” said Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police (crime).

Roy said that following Chetna’s murder, Purohit left Mumbai. “After we arrested Maneria recently, we learned that Purohit was back in the city. We had laid a trap for him, but he got a whiff of it and fled again,” Roy said.

According to sources, after fleeing Mumbai, Purohit headed to Lucknow. “When Maneria was caught, we found a few phone numbers that were used by Purohit to contact him. We tracked the numbers and found he was in Colonelganj area near Lucknow,” said assistant inspector Anil Dhole.

He added, “The police there told us that they had recently registered a missing case where the parents suspected one Rahul Joshi to have eloped with their 16-year-old daughter. We showed photographs of Purohit to them and they identified him as Joshi.”

The police started tracking Joshi’s movement and learnt that he was hiding in Rajasthan’s Rajsamandh district, from where he was nabbed on Thursday. “He spent lakhs of rupees living a lavish lifestyle and also spent a lot of money on bar girls in Mumbai,” said Niket Kaushik, additional commissioner.

@DNA