A 41-year-old man was arrested from Santa Cruz on Tuesday for allegedly spoofing telephone calls and threatening political leaders.

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He is believed to have made calls to over a dozen political leaders from Maharashtra including Kirit Somaiya, Sardar Tarasingh, Gopinath Munde and Ramdas Kadam.

The arrested person, Mohammad Mufeez Shahbandari, a Class 12 class dropout, is a native of Bhatkal in Karnataka. A tech-savvy Shahbandari runs a visa and passport agency in Bandra.

Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) chief Rakesh Maria said they had been receiving complaints from party leaders since February 2011 of abusive and threatening phone calls.

"We learnt that the calls were spoofed. That means the actual users of the mobile phone numbers from which the threats were issued had not made the calls. Instead, the numbers were used by Shahbandari," said Maria.

He added that the ATS had been working on the case for 14 months. The calls were made during Ramzan last year, November last year and February this year. “It is a unique case of detection as this seems to be the first case of call spoofing in the state. Multiple hopping was found in the calls when we tried to trace them," he said.

Shahbandari claims he had borrowed money and was unable to repay them. “If the creditors demanded money, he would spoof their calls to make threat calls to politicians," said an ATS officer, requesting anonymity.

The police have seized a laptop, three mobile phones, a pen drive and a hard disk from Shahbandari. “He had chosen to make threat calls to politicians as he knew that these calls would be taken seriously by the police, and also the police would call the user of the mobile numbers for questioning. While making a threat call to Ramdas Kadam he had said that Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray would be killed," said the officer.

Shahbandari has been remanded in police custody until April 9. A cheating case had been registered against him by the Goa police' crime branch, this year.