CBI nabs fugitive woman from Indore after nearly two decades of chase

New Delhi: After a long manhunt of nearly two decades, the CBI has arrested wanted proclaimed offender Mani M. Sekhar in a Rs 8 crore bank fraud case from Indore where she was living under an assumed identity, officials said Thursday.

She was chargesheet by the CBI along with her husband Ramanujam Muthuramalingam Sekhar in 2007 in Bengaluru for misappropriating the loan funds from the State Bank of India using a web of deceit and fraudulent documentation between 2002 and 2005 through their companies Indo Marks Pvt. Ltd. and its affiliated entity, BTC Home Products Pvt. Ltd, the agency alleged.

When it came to trial, the couple vanished into thin air prompting the special court to declare them proclaimed offenders in 2009.

"Despite sustained efforts over the years to trace them, these absconding accused had remained untraceable, prompting CBI to announce a reward of Rs. 50,000 each for clues to informers. While other co-accused were tried and convicted and acquitted in the case, the trial against these two absconding accused remained pending," CBI's spokesperson said in a statement.

The trail also went cold till now when CBI used its sophisticated image search analytics software delivering the results with almost 90 per cent accuracy followed by a covert and meticulous field verification to confirm the results, officials said.

It emerged during investigation that the couple had reinvented themselves as Mr and Mrs Krishna Kumar Gupta, comfortably settling in Indore.

They had abandoned all previous identifiers -- names, contact details, PAN cards, and even biometric-linked records and had never used old KYC records since fleeing from Bengaluru.

"They changed their names to Krishna Kumar Gupta (husband) and Geetha Krishna Kumar Gupta (wife), their mobile numbers, emails, PAN numbers and other information which were used before the charge sheet was filed," the statement said.

But using sophisticated image comparison algorithms, the CBI managed to compare old photographic records with contemporary data sources, leading to a more than 90 per cent match.

This was followed by field verifications by a special operations team of the agency in Indore.

It also emerged during verification that her husband had passed away in 2008 while living under his fabricated persona.

"Mani M. Sekhar was finally arrested on July 12 and produced before a court in Bengaluru which remanded the accused in judicial custody for further trial proceedings. Currently, the accused is facing trial after absconding for nearly two decades," the spokesperson said.