Gujarat: Three weeks on run, man who posed as fake CMO official nabbed from Assam-Mizoram border

Vadodara: A man, who escaped from police custody after being arrested for posing as an official of the Gujarat chief minister's office and raping a woman, was apprehended near the Assam-Mizoram border after being on the run for three weeks, police said on Monday.

The police arrested the accused conman Viraj Patel from near the Assam-Mizoram border and brought him to Vadodara on Monday, an official said.

According to the police, Patel had managed to dodge a police official and escape from the premises of a court here when he was being produced before a judge on November 10.

He was arrested in April on the charges of cheating, forgery, rape and pretending to hold any particular office as a public servant and was lodged at Vadodara central jail as an undertrial, he said.

He had allegedly posed as an official from the CMO and president of the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City), he said.

A police sub-inspector and a constable were suspended after Patel escaped custody, and the city crime branch formed teams to apprehend him, the official said.

As per a statement issued by the Vadodara crime branch, officials scanned around 500 CCTV footage, used technical surveillance and human intelligence and covered a distance of around 7,000 km to trace the accused to the northeastern states, from where he was trying to cross the international border.

After fleeing Gujarat, Patel ended up in Chhattisgarh, from where he travelled to Bihar, Assam, and Tripura and was found to be hiding somewhere in Assam and Mizoram, it stated.

'After locating the accused in Tripura, Assam and Mizoram, the crime branch formed teams to keep a watch as he constantly changed his hideout. The police managed to track him down somewhere along the Assam-Mizoram border, arrested and brought him back to Vadodara,' the police said.

The accused is a history-sheeter who has cases of theft and cheating to his name in police stations in Ahmedabad. He was arrested in Vadodara for raping and cheating a woman and using fake identity cards, it said.