Jamshedpur, April 18: City police here brought fugitive criminal Vikram Sharma (45), who is known to have mentored gangster Akhilesh Singh, arrested on Saturday night from Dehradun (Uttarakhand), to the steel city.
City SP Prashant Anand, said that they went to Delhi from Uttarakhand and took a flight for Ranchi and then came on an SUV to Jamshedpur.
�We have completed the process of transit remand in Dehradun on Monday and reached Delhi and boarded a flight for Ranchi. We will produce Vikram Sharma in Jamshedpur civil court on Wednesday for a judicial remand,� said city SP.
Sharma however, reportedly refused to give much information about his confession made before the police. Sources said he had given important leads on Akhilesh Singh.
�The investigation is moving in the right direction. We have collected several papers indicating Vikram Sharma, a resident of Sonari and currently staying in Dehradun, his involvement with the business networks of Akhilesh Singh at several places like Noida, UP, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand.
We have also got information about the extortion racket of the gangster. Interrogation is still on at Bistupur police station in a closed room,� said a senior DSP rank official. Incidentally, Vikram Sharma had been absconding ever since his involvement surfaced in connection with the murder of businessman Ashish Dey (early 2008) and did not return to the city to evade police arrest.
Sources said the fugitive had amassed several crores through criminal activities focused mainly on `extortion’ of businessmen and traders, and even the corporate houses.
He used to run his `business’ through a syndicate of criminals which has an effective strength of over 100 members. He has even invested the money earned from the extortions in real estate business in Jamshedpur and several other cities in Jharkhand and Bihar, sources said.
Akhilesh is accused in more than two dozen cases of grievous crime. The prominent cases in which he was wanted, include murder of shoe baron Ashish Dey, murder of Tata Steel security inspector Jairam Singh, murder of gangster Paramjeet Singh inside Ghaghidih Central Jail, the jailer Uma Shanker Pandey murder case in which he has already been sentenced to life imprisonment and kidnapping and murder of mobile merchant Om Prakash Kabra.