‘Wanted to teach owner a lesson’: Ex-accountant set fire to Surat textile market over pending Rs 10,000

Several shops on the sixth floor of Shyam Sangini Textile Market were gutted in the fire.

The Surat Crime Branch on Monday arrested a man on charges of setting fire to a Surat textile market on September 9, leading to an estimated loss of around Rs 24 crores.

The accused, identified as Vinod Salve, a resident of Maharashtra’s Dhule district, worked as an accountant at a shop in Shyam Sangini Textile market in Surat.

During his primary interrogation, Salve, who quit his job as accountant at the shop a month ago allegedly due to the harassment by  his seniors and the shop owner, confessed to setting fire to Shyam Sangini Textile market in a bid to “teach his former owner a lesson about the importance of money”, police said.    Salve, according to police, claimed that he did not get his pending salary of  Rs 10,000 and that the  owner refused to  give it during his multiple visits to the shop after he left his job, by giving some excuse or the other.

The fire broke out on the sixth floor of Shyam Sangini textile market in the early morning on September 9. The fire department got a call around 12.50 am and sent teams to fight the fire that took 14 hours to douse. All the shops on the floor were gutted while some on the fifth floor of the six-storey building were also affected.

Salve was caught based on CCTV footage that showed a masked man sprinkling something on parcels of textile goods stacked in the passage for delivery, and setting them ablaze.  As per the footage, the man was inside the building for just four minutes after midnight of September 8. The police lodged an FIR booking an unknown person for arson before Salve was identified

Bought petrol a day before, Ayodhya visit after fire    

On a tip off, the Surat city crime branch officials reached the Dindoli area, a largely migrant ghetto, on Monday and spotted Salve standing on the roadside and detained him.

Salve disclosed that he had worked as an accountant in a textile trading shop on the sixth floor in Shyam Sangini market since April 2026, on a monthly salary of Rs 30,000.

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He claimed that his senior accountant and the firm owner would “nag and scold” him, picking faults in his work. Feeling humiliated, he left the job a month ago and asked for the pending salary amount of Rs. 10,000 from the senior accountant and the owner. Over regular phone calls and personal visits to the firm, he was told to come the next day or some other date. According to the police Salve wanted to “teach a lesson” to his former employer and thus hatched a plan to set fire to the parcels placed outside the shops during the night for delivery, “in a bid to cause losses”.

Additional Commissioner of police Karanraj Vaghela said, “A day before the fire incident, Vinod Salve bought petrol for Rs. 150 in a bottle from a pump in Dindoli. As per the plan, he went to the Shyam Sangini textile market, at Saroli, and after all the shops were closed, he entered late in the market and reached the sixth floor and sprinkled petrol on the parcels of sarees and dress materials placed on the passage area and set them on fire.”

He added, “After setting fire, he secretly escaped from the market and left the area on his bike. He did not go to his native place fearing that police would come there and catch him. Instead, he went to Rajasthan and Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh and returned to Surat on Sunday night. Our teams got a tip-off and caught him from Surat’s Dindoli area on Monday.”

The Surat crime branch officials handed over the accused to Saroli police station for further investigation.