Youth arrested for firing at cops at Mumbai CST

MUMBAI: Passengers on Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus���s main concourse were reminded of the 26/11 terror attacks on Saturday when a 19-year-old youth fired a round at a group of policemen chasing him.
It turned out that the youth, Rajesh Tomar, was a hawker and had panicked when the cops frisked him and found a revolver. He ran all the way from platform 7 on the suburban section to platform 18 on the main concourse, where he was finally caught. Nobody was injured in the incident.

Despite interrogating Tomar for the entire day, the police couldn���t figure out why he was carrying the loaded revolver. He gave them conflicting replies���initially, he claimed that he wanted to kill his father; then he said he wanted to avenge his father���s killing; finally, Tomar said he wanted to bump off a man who was harassing his girlfriend.
���Tomar, a Std X passout, lives in Lonavla with his parents and a younger brother. He lied to us that he lives in a Dadar slum. He sells gutka packets on the Kasara-Kalyan stretch of Central Railway,������ senior inspector Dilip Mane said.
Late on Friday night, Tomar boarded a Kasara local. He wanted to get off at Khardi but fell asleep. Sweepers woke him up at 1.45 am when the train reached CST, its final destination.
Tomar got off on platform 5 at CST. But the moment he saw a group of patrolling policemen, he turned away and started walking in the opposite direction. Finding his movements suspicious, the police asked him to stop.
Tomar then jumped onto the tracks and crossed over till he reached platform 7. There, he was confronted by two constables���R M Dekhne and Sagar Patil. When they started frisking him, Tomar whipped out a revolver and pointed it towards Dhakne���s stomach.
���Dhakne assumed that the gun was a toy. He asked Tomar to put it away and stop scaring people. Tomar then put the revolver back in his trouser pocket and sprinted across to the main concourse,������ an officer said.
Sub-inspector Manoj Saindre, assistant inspector Suraj Padvi and their staff chased him. On reaching platform 18, Tomar turned back and fired a shot randomly towards the cops, who ducked. The bullet missed them.
Meanwhile, Dhakne had alerted other police officials on the wireless. A team caught Tomar on platform 18 and seized the countrymade revolver, two live cartridges and an empty cartridge from him.
Officials said Tomar was a native of Khandwa taluka in Madhya Pradesh and had procured the revolver from his hometown. He has no crime record in Mumbai.
Tomar was booked on attempt to murder charges on Saturday and a railway court sent him to police custody till February 12. A total of 8-10 police officials were involved in Saturday���s operation.