'Godman' offers to get back Malad woman's jewellery, kidnaps her

MUMBAI: A self-styled godman has been arrested for kidnapping a 22-year-old Malad woman, who had contacted him on the internet. A Malad police team brought Sandeep Patel (44) from Gujarat to Mumbai on Thursday and reunited the woman with her family.
"The woman had befriended Akshay Maru on Facebook. The two soon exchanged numbers and started chatting on the phone.Maru told her that he was in need of money as he was going through a crisis," said investigating officer Sunil Shinde.
The woman's father had got jewellery made for her and had kept it in a vault in her room. As Maru persisted, she started "lending" him her jewellery; she ended up giving away ornaments worth Rs 12 lakh to Maru. But when Maru refused to return her ornaments, she got terrified of being questioned by her parents about the missing jewellery. She confided in a female friend, who suggested black magic as a remedy to retrieve the ornaments, an officer said. The woman then surfed the internet and found a website run by Patel claiming to solve every kind of problems.
A native of Ahmedabad, Patel had moved base to Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh. He told the woman that it was necessary for her to visit Vrindavan and conduct some rituals to get her jewellery back. On September 27, he met the woman, but instead of taking her to Vrindavan, he took her to Gujarat.
The victim's father lodged a complaint with the Malad police, and they started looking for her. "Our teams made rounds of Gujarat twice, besides Delhi and UP. Patel would keep changing his mobile phone's SIM card, which made it difficult to track him down. Eventually, his location was traced to Sidhpur in Gujarat, and he brought back to Mumbai on Tuesday. The girl was reunited with her family. Maru, too, was arrested and booked for breach of trust," said an officer.
The police said that Patel was computer savvy and may have conned other people across the country. He would also claim that he was celibate.