According to Bhatt, at 11.45am of June 14, 2006, three unidentified armed men descended on his Juhu office asking for his brother Mukesh and himself.
In yet another indication of the Bollywood-underworld nexus, fugitive gangster Ravi Pujari admitted on tape that he ordered the attempt on the life of film producer-director Mahesh Bhatt and advocate Majeed Memon in 2006 “for their nexus to Dawood Ibrahim”.
In a taped interview played before special MCOCA judge MR Bhatkar on Monday, Pujari claimed, “Maine hi ye hamla kiya hai”, but added that, “Yeh extortion nahi hai. Ye kuch aur hai.” The tape, whose transcript runs into ten pages, was played during Bhatt’s testimony against Pujari and his henchmen.
According to Bhatt, at 11.45am of June 14, 2006, three unidentified armed men descended on his Juhu office asking for his brother Mukesh and himself.
Since neither of them was at the office, they threatened to shoot the accountant, but then fled after firing in the air. They left behind an envelope containing Pujari’s name and phone numbers.
While five men were later arrested as conspirators, three others, including Pujari, are absconding. “Bhatt’s testimony links the arrested accused to Pujari’s gang, thus proving the MCOCA charges against the gangster,” said prosecutor Dilip Shah.
“This case has to be built link by link, starting with the eye-witness testimony of the accountant and ending with the confessions of accused Santosh Poojari and Ramesh Kanojia,” added Shah.
Testifying as having received threat calls but not ‘relating to any extortion’, Bhatt said that in the evening of the incident, a news channel invited him to talk about it. Half-way through the programme, the channel received a call from Pujari. In court, Bhatt had essentially to identify the voice on the interview tape as Pujari’s.
Although “he had not met or spoken to Pujari to be able to identify his voice”, Bhatt identified the “voice of the caller at the interview as that of the person who had threatened me over the phone”.
In the channel-interview tape played in court, the caller identified himself as Ravi Pujari and then went on to revile Bhatt as a sweet-talking cohort of Dawood and Chotta Shakeel, “Tumhara aur Dawood/ Chotta Shakeel ka lena dena hai, meethi baat karte ho par jaan-pehchan hai, dosti hai.”
When asked to prove his allegations, the caller said he was convinced of its truth and saw no reason to provide any, “Proof vakil log ko chhahiye. Saboot dena mera kaam nahi hai.”
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