Phones off, then one call to a cab driver: How Tiger Shroff’s attackers were caught

Until that moment, the accused had been careful to keep their phones switched off as they moved from place to place, to avoid getting tracked.

On Sunday night, one of the accused switched on his phone to book a cab to Surat through an aggregator from outside Borivali railway station. When the cab did not turn up, he called the driver and directed him to the spot where they were waiting. The three then left for Surat.

“We had tracked down the phone used by the accused based on technical intelligence after identifying them through CCTV cameras. But they kept it switched off. Once the call was made to the cabbie, the phone was switched off again. We, however, got the number of the cabbie,” said an officer involved in the probe.

Police then called the cab driver, a Surat resident who regularly ran a cab service on that route. By then, he had already dropped the three men off. He took police to Surat bus stand, where he had left them, and CCTV footage from the spot showed the accused waiting around there.

Three accused captured after attack on actor Tiger Shroff in CCTV footage.

The accused waited for a bus for some time, but eventually decided to take the Pune-Jaipur train from Surat. Police found CCTV footage from the platform that showed which coach the three boarded.

“The next stop of the train was Kota and our team was two hours away. Hence we contacted the Kota police and told them the location of the coach, based on which they arrested the accused,” an officer said.

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Around 9.45 am on Monday, Kota Superintendent of Police Tejaswani Gautam received a call from Tilak Raj Roushan, her 2013 IPS batchmate and now a Deputy Commissioner of Police with Mumbai Police.

More than two dozen police personnel were then deployed in and around Kota railway station, outside the station, at the entry and exit points, in the yard and on the platforms, Gautam said.

Two of the three accused arrested on Monday. (ANI)

“The entire train was searched and the accused were identified. Once their identity was confirmed in the general coach, it was surrounded, to prevent them from escaping, and the accused were apprehended,” she said. No weapons were recovered from them, Gautam said. The train terminates at Jaipur, but the three were planning to take a bus from there to Delhi and then head to Nepal, she said.

Earlier, an officer with the Mumbai Police said that the three accused, Phool Singh, Rehan R and Hrithik Mahto, rode triple-seat on a motorcycle from Juhu to Andheri railway station, and took a train to Borivali from there. “In the past we had arrested shooters in the Rohit Shetty case who had taken a long distance train from Kalyan. Hence the accused in this case decided to avoid trains and only took a local train till Kandivali,” the officer said.

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The officer added that they took the long-distance train from Surat only after no bus came to the Surat bus stand. “They kept changing their mode of transport to confuse us,” the officer said.