Shariful Islam Shehzad, a Bangladeshi national who attacked Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan at his apartment in Bandra, sneaked into India through West Bengal in 2023 and travelled to Mumbai in search of a job, said police.
Shariful spent two months in Kolkata and its adjoining areas but his attempts to settle in Bengal proved futile due to limited employment opportunities in the state, said an officer of West Bengal police.
“He crossed over the border in the North 24 Parganas district and adopted a new identity as Bijoy Das at the end of 2023. He intended to work as a daily labourer in Kolkata, but that plan did not succeed. As a result, Shariful decided to leave the state,” stated an officer from the Intelligence Branch of the West Bengal police.
Mumbai police shared Shariful’s information with West Bengal police requesting their counterparts to trace the 30-year-old Bangladeshi national’s footprints in Bengal.
“We are also trying to find out whether Shariful committed any crime in Bengal during the period that he had spent here,” said the officer.
Unable to find a job in Bengal, 30-year-old Shariful arrived in Mumbai in early 2024. “He met an agent in Mumbai who introduced him to Jitendra Pandey, owner of an agency that supplies manpower in Worli and Thane. Pandey, apparently unaware of Shariful’s illegal entry, provided Shariful with a housekeeping job in a pub in Worli. But he was terminated from the job in August, within two months of his employment, after the pub authorities caught him stealing,” said an officer of central Intelligence Bureau (IB)
Shariful was in touch with Pandey and got another job in a restaurant in Thane in September. “The restaurant authorities repeatedly asked Shariful to produce his Aadhaar card, a common requirement for identity verification. But each time, he claimed he had lost the document. Shariful lost his job again in December. Shariful then managed to obtain a fake Aadhaar card through a well-oiled network which provides fake documents to illegal immigrants ,” said an IB officer.
Being jobless and desperate for Money, Shariful started plotting to rob wealthy homes.
“We are yet to ascertain whether he committed any crime before entering the actor’s apartment,” said the officer.
Shariful’s footprints in Bengal sparked a row on social media as Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Malviya called out opposition parties, including the Congress and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. The in-charge of BJP’s IT cell said the incident would not have occurred had the opposition parties not exploited illegal immigrants as vote banks.
“Mumbai police have confirmed that Mohammad Shariful Islam, who attacked Saif Ali Khan, is an illegal resident and had assumed a Hindu identity. Political parties like the Congress, TMC among others in the INDI Alliance, that exploits illegal immigrants as vote banks and had sought to communalise this incident, to malign Hindus should apologise,” Mlviya said on X.
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