HYDERABAD:
Land sharks
TDP MLC
Deepak Reddy
and advocate
Shailesh Saxena
used muscle and
ingenuity
to coerce their victims to
gobble land
. They scripted an uncanny scam blueprint with a ghost character, Iqbal Islam Khan, who was named litigant to harass residents. Once land was usurped, scamsters 'murdered' their phantom by moving court on the ground that Khan was missing and may have been killed. And then they tried to hurl the murder charge on residents of Mustafa Hills Cooperative Housing Society at Bhojagutta on the belief that every shred of evidence would be snuffed out.
However, their plans turned topsy-turvy after police blew the lid on the land scam and discovered Iqbal was a fictitious monster created for fraudulent land deals.
After the duo was arrested last week, startling revelations about their modus operandi emerged. It has now come to light that last December, a court referred-case was lodged at Asif Nagar police station that Iqbal may have been killed by locals of Mustafa Hills Cooperative Housing Society in Asif Nagar as he had a 'legal tussle' over land ownership.
During investigation by Central Crime Station (CCS) into the land scam, police came to know that Iqbal Islam Khan, on whose names several land documents were created and several cases were filed against Mustafa Hills society residents, turned out to be fake.
"It's a well-thought out plan to wipe out every trace of the fictional character
Iqbal Khan and, at the same time fix Mustafa Colony residents. It was part of the larger conspiracy in the land scam,'' a credible source in Hyderabad police told STOI. Deepak and Saxena had been putting pressure on Mustafa Colony residents in different ways to vacate the 78-acre land. "In fact, the impersonator who deposed as Iqbal in court was found to be Shiva Bhushanam and he is still alive," the source said.
Similarly, another complaint was filed a few months ago stating a watchman of the MLC was abducted by Mustafa Colony residents, but strangely the complaint was lodged in Tadipatri town in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh, the native place of Deepak Reddy. Even this complaint turned out to be bogus during investigation.