MUMBAI: The police said on Monday that they would recreate the series of events leading to the knife attack on Saif Ali Khan while taking care that the actor or his family does not have to mentally relive the trauma of last week’s violent experience.
“We have to be mindful that the actor and his family are traumatised after everything that they have been through. All precautions will be taken while recreating the sequence of events at the crime scene,” an officer said.
A 150-member police team tracked down the suspect, Shariful Fakir, a Bangladeshi national believed to be living illegally here, from a marshy area at the edge of Thane in a massive combing operation early on Sunday.
The police have strong reason to believe that Shariful might have had a prior criminal record in Bangladesh. “He had carried tools used for burglaries such as hammers et cetera, besides the knife. The CCTV footage shows him going up the building without footwear but wearing his shoes on his way downstairs. This indicates he was careful to carry his shoes in his bag on his way up as he had climbed up the pipes,” an officer said.
Back in Bangladesh, Shariful has two brothers. His parents also live there. He is not married and has no relatives here. The police have not found any Indian identification documents on him.
“A day after the crime, Shariful saw his CCTV images being flashed on television news. He panicked on realising that the police were on his trail. He went into hiding in Thane with plans to board the Geetanjali Express to Howrah and cross the border to Bangladesh,” an officer said.
Before Shariful could execute his escape, a police team tracked him down.
A team of 75 policemen involved in the case was felicitated on Monday by joint police commissioner (law and order) Satyanarayan.
Political attacks over the incident continued, with Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Aaditya Thackeray criticising the Centre and state govt over the Bangladeshi nationality of the suspect in the Khan attack case. Thackeray said that the man turning out to be a Bangladeshi illegal immigrant was concerning.
He said the home departments, whether at the Centre or state, were with the BJP for the past decade and the party could not blame anyone else for the illegal immigration problem.
“The protection of cross-border illegal immigration is the duty of the union govt, which clearly failed to do so in the past decade,” Thackeray said in a post on X.
“Those from any political party, trying to make it a political issue, must actually question the central govt on its failure to curb illegal immigration from Bangladesh. The Centre must release true figures of the illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in our country, and tell us how many they deported in the past 10 years, and what action they’re taking now,” he said.