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TOI : PUNE: A jilted lover abducted a married woman and her three-year-old son on Thursday near Bharati hospital on Pune-Satara road, only to release them subsequently. The woman was dropped near Karad on the same day, while the child was later dropped near the victim’s home in Bibvewadi on Saturday afternoon.

The suspect was identified as Ashish Dattatraya Mahamuni (30) of Konark Park, Bibvewadi. According to police, the victim used to run a mess through her home where she came in contact with Ashish four years back. Her husband is a rickshaw driver. The nature of relationship between Ashish and the woman is not known, but police say that their ‘association’ strained following which Ashish abducted the woman and her son.

On Thursday afternoon, when the victim was on her way home with her son, Ashish blocked her way and asked her to marry him. When she refused Ashish, he forced them into a car and took them to Panchgani. Then on Friday he dropped the victim near his hometown Pusesawali near Karad and fled with the child.

The victim lodged a complaint with the Bharati Vidyapeeth police station on Friday. A case of kidnapping was registered against Ashish and a trap was laid near his home to nab him. Fearing arrest, on Saturday afternoon, Ashish contacted the victim over the phone and dropped the child near her home and escaped.

Sub-inspector Krushna Shete of Bharati Vidyapeeth police station is investigating the case. …More

TOI : PUNE: In a startling development, the state criminal investigation department (CID), Pune, has unearthed another 29 cases of forged Urban Land Ceiling (ULC) certificate orders.

The forgery of ULC orders came to light while carrying out investigations in a ULC scam (crime register no. 444/2005) registered with the Swargate police station in 2005. The unearthing of fresh cases has sent ripples in the state home department in Mumbai.

During investigations, the CID’s economic offence wing found that some builders had submitted forged ULC orders in large numbers with both the PMC and PCMC to get their plans approved.

According to the CID, the suspects involved in forging the ULC orders have forged signatures and affixed the seal of the office of the additional collector and competent authority of Pune Agglomeration.

The CID has submitted a report to the additional chief secretary of the home department to grant it permission to go ahead with the investigations.

However, the government is surprisingly in no mood to give the permission and has instead dashed off a letter to the CID to hand over all the cases to the PMC and PCMC for taking action against the officials concerned and others involved in the scam.

CID officials told TOI that the government was not keen on granting it permission to go ahead with the investigations because it had earlier failed to obtain permission from the home department when it registered three new cases of cheating under the ULC with the Swargate, Deccan Gymkhana and Pimpri police stations between 2006 and 2007. …More

TOI : PUNE: High drama was witnessed at a plush city mall in the Pune cantonment on Sunday afternoon after an alarm clock went off in a bag kept at the counter of a clothing retail shop by four National Defence Academy (NDA) cadets. Not willing to take chances, the security staff summoned the bomb disposal and detection squad and evacuated more than 1,000 shoppers at the mall.

According to the Bund Garden police, the four cadets, after shopping at the SGS mall for some time, went for lunch at a restaurant on the ground floor. The cadets had arrived from Delhi by a flight earlier in the day.

The alarm clock went off at around 3.15 pm in the bag of one of the cadets, Saurabh Rawat. The employee manning the baggage counter at the store panicked and alerted the security in-charge, Hrishikesh Rai.

Rai immediately picked up the bag and placed it on the steps outside the mall before calling up the police. He also made repeated announcements over the public address system to check if the bag belonged to any shopper, but got no response. He also informed the shoppers about the bag and appealed to them to leave the mall. About 1,000 customers left the premises after the annoucement was made.

The bomb squad used sniffer dogs and some advanced machinery to detect if the bag contained a bomb. Meanwhile, shoppers and passers-by had gathered in large numbers outside the mall to get a glimpse of the squad’s operations.

Just when curiosity had reached a peak, the NDA cadets learnt of the commotion and came outside to tell the squad and the police that the bag was theirs. They clarified that they had left an alarm clock in the bag.

The cadets were summoned to the Council Hall police chowky and were allowed to go…More

TOI : PUNE: The south-west monsoon which hit Pune and Mumbai on Saturday is expected to prevail over the entire state in next two to three days. The city has witnessed 42 mm rains since start of this month, while the normal fall for June is 113 mm.

“Conditions are favourable for further advance of monsoon over parts of south Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa during the next 2-3 days,” the met department said, adding that the rains made no progress on Sunday with the city getting 6.2 mm rain.

The monsoon hit Pune, Satara and Mumbai on Saturday. The northern limit of monsoon is passing through Dahanu, Pune, Satara, Gulbarga, Hanamkunda and Visakhapatnam. The conditions remained cloudy on Sunday and would remain so for the next 48 hours with continues drizzles.

“The off–shore trough at sea level from Maharashtra to Kerala coasts now extends from south Gujarat coast to Kerala. A cyclonic circulation extending upto mid tropospheric levels lies over east central Arabian sea off south Gujarat–north Maharashtra coasts,” the met department said.

Mumbai continued to witness lashing showers and recorded 53 mm rainfall. Other districts in Maharashtra too got good rainfall including Alibaug 24 mm, Kolhapur 21 mm, Mahabaleshwar 49 mm, Nashik 3 mm, Nagpur 2 mm, Ratnagiri 29 mm, Sangli 11 mm and Satara 8 mm. …More

TOI : PUNE: A man allegedly raped his fiancee and later refused to marry her, citing petty reasons. The Sahakarnagar police have arrested Manoj Kharade (25), a resident of Dhankawdi, on charges of rape, kidnapping and cheating his 26-year-old fiancee, who is the talathi of a village in Ahmednagar.

Police sub-inspector R.S. Jagdale said the marriage was fixed and a formal engagement ceremony was held in November last year. Kharade, working with an animation company, used to seek permission from her parents to spend time with her. The parents gave consent to take the woman with him to Pune. Kharade allegedly brought her to his flat at Dhankawdi and allegedly forced her to have sex a few times. He also threatened to break the marriage when she refused.

Later in January this year, Kharade refused to marry the woman saying he did not like her looks. After several attempts at counselling and trying to convince the man, the woman’s family finally gave up and lodged a complaint at the Sahakarnagar police station.

In another incident, a woman, who was regularly beaten up by her drunkard husband, committed suicide recently. The woman, Anita Khurpe (35), is a resident of Hadapsar. Her father Tukaram Kalbhar (65) from Parbhani has accused her alcoholic husband Kashinath (40) of torturing her physically and mentally. …More