For Vijay Palande and Simran Sood, arrested for their alleged involvement in the murder of wannabe producer Karan Kakkar early in March, life imitates art.
For Vijay Palande and Simran Sood, arrested for their alleged involvement in the murder of wannabe producer Karan Kakkar early in March, life imitates art. And their lives read much like a racy pulp fiction script - there are the dreamers and those who promise to give wings to their dreams, come what may. Tying them up all together is the big, bad world of crime.
Script runs wrong
A seemingly simple of case of a murder of a senior citizen at Oshiwara recently and the arrest of Palande thereafter threw open the Pandora's Box - an aspiring producer from Delhi, Kakkar, gone AWOL, his missing BMW, his neighbour/struggling model, Sood, who had close relations with Palande hobnobbing with A-list actors and international cricketers, sparking rumours of match-fixing, the finding of Kakkar's body, chopped into pieces, at Kumbharli Ghat near Satara and connections with the underworld and allegedly with politicians. The police soon found themselves quickly connecting the dots. But, there was one element of the case that confounded them throughout - the relationship between Sood and Palande. That is, till Wednesday.
Conflict of masks
Much has been written about on the relationship between the two - best buddies, said close friends; siblings and even uncle-niece duo, claimed Sood and Palande during various interrogations. Their changing avatars earned them the moniker of the (in)famous Bunty and Babli couple, two celluloid con artistes, immortalised by Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee, who changed their on-screen relationships to dupe gullible clients' faster than their attire. Palande and Sood aren't the first to reportedly take inspiration to commit crimes. Rifle through cases and you'll find a trove of con artistes whose lives of crime ran like scripts from Bollywood and Hollywood movies (see box).
Breakthrough
On Wednesday, though, the police reportedly succeeded in pulling off the layers of masks. Sood claimed that she and Palande are actually married, a fact hidden to all who knew the couple. Sources from the crime branch say the latest in Sood's flips-flops was this admission. She was put through sustained interrogation over her alleged involvement in 28-year-old Kakkar's murder and her relationship with gangster Palande. Two days later, she started spilling the beans and took everyone by surprise when she claimed to be Palande's wife.
"We learnt that Sood had introduced Palande to Kakkar as her brother. During interrogation, she had been changing her statements about her relationship with Palande. Initially, she said they were best buddies. Later, she claimed that they were siblings, and then she changed it to being his niece. Finally, she spoke the truth and said she is Palande's wife," says a crime branch officer, requesting anonymity.
When Bonnie met Clyde
Thirty-eight-year-old Sood's story, too, reads like a movie script. She arrived in Mumbai in the late 1990s with dreams of making it big in Bollywood. The struggler met Palande, then an employee of a Juhu restaurant, in the same building as the gymnasium she frequented, and before they knew it, they were in love. "They married in 1998, their marriage was not registered," explains the officer.
Soon, the rose-tinted glasses came off. They chose to hide their relationship, allegedly to lure clients (Sood was reportedly used as honey trap). The police are now investigating if Palande's German wife, Nivis Ligenza, knew about the duo's relationship. "It is not possible to call Ligenza for questioning, as she is in Germany," says another police officer. The next best course of action, therefore, will be confronting Palande and Simran to determine whether Ligenza was in the loop on their relationship, and if not, why, adds the officer.
"Giving wrong information about their relationship to others was part of their modus operandi. They would identify targets, mostly single men staying in the city with a good financial background, and then, if required, eliminate them," explains an officer from the Oshiwara police station.
"Yes, they were acting like a Bunty and Babli couple. Sood admitted during her interrogation that she and Palande are actually man and wife. We are looking at others they may have taken for a ride," says Deven Bharti, additional commissioner of police, crime.
What gave them away
Palande had taken the flat of Arun Tikku (whose murder he was arrested for and which led to the unravelling of Kakkar's killing) on a lease on March 15 in Ligenza's name after paying a deposit of Rs5 lakh and a rent Rs30,000 per month. Sood was nowhere in the picture at the time of the arrest of Palande and his two associates - Dhananjay Shinde and Manoj Gajkosh - for Tikku's murder.
Kakkar, who was taken an apartment on rent at the Oberai Spring Building in Veera Desai at Andheri (W), worked as a lyricist in the Hindi film industry and dreamed of opening his own production house. Just before he went missing on March, he told his older brother, Hanish that a neighbour (Sood) and her brother (Palande) would introduce him to a financier who would fund his production house.
"They eyed property, cash and expensive vehicles of wealthy people. While they were eyeing Tikku's plush house, they stole Kakkar BMW car, along with his debit cards and ornaments worth Rs50lakh," said the police officer. Much before Tikku and Kakakr fell prey to his scheming mind, Palande had duped a Karnataka-based businessman, Gurudutt Jairam, by forcibly grabbing his Mercedes car.
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