Ravi Pujari being grilled about Bengaluru murders

A day after bringing gangster Ravi Pujari to Bengaluru, police started questioning him about some of the high-profile crimes he is suspected to be involved in.

Police said he was largely cooperating in the interrogation.

A team led by Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Sandeep Patil is questioning Pujari about his involvement in the crimes. Patil himself spent hours supervising the investigation process.

Patil said: "We are focusing on two cases: a double murder in 2007 where Pujari's men attacked the office of Shabnam Developers in Tilak Nagar and killed two employees. Another case is the murder of a builder named Subbaraju in Vyalikaval in 2001."

Police will later interrogate him about cases of attempted murder and extortion. Police say Pujari was involved in 97 crimes in Karnataka, including 47 in Bengaluru and the rest in Mangaluru and Udupi.

Establishing Pujari's role in all these cases, however, won't be easy for the police. Establishing his role in decades-old cases would be a difficult task, a senior officer said. "We will unearth his links with the underworld in Karnataka and Maharastra. He had a wide network of informants who tipped him off about rich people and he would extort money from them by making threat calls. We haven't picked up any of his men but have a list of some of them who were arrested in the past. Many were not even caught once."

Amar Kumar Pandey, Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order), said central agencies and police officers from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Kerala were in touch with the Karnataka police. "We'll hand him over to them only after we finish investigating all his crimes in Karnataka," he added.