by Raashid Andrabi
SRINAGAR: After his five-day remand concluded, the Kashmir conman known as Syed Ishaan Bukhari has been sent to Ragadi Jail in Odisha’s Jajpur area on the orders issued by Chandokhol JMFC Court, reports reaching from Bhubaneswar said. He was arrested by the Special Task Force of the Odisha Crime Branch on December 16, from rented accommodation in Neulpur’s Milit Nagar housing settlement.
Bukhari, whose real name is Tahir Ahmad, is a resident of Waskura village of Handwara and has been living in Odisha for seven years. He has been accused of deceiving people by masquerading and impersonating an ‘army doctor’, ‘PMO official’ and a relative of a top NIA official.
Reports appearing in various media outlets within and outside Odhisa suggest that Bukhari is being investigated for several things.
During his 5-day police remand, he was grilled for possible offshore links. Apart from the Odisha police, some federal security agencies have also joined the questioning. Though the police had initially ruled out sabotage links, the subsequent reports suggest his complete call detail report (CDR) has been retrieved. It includes some of the “voice messages” that he had deleted after talking to people offshore.
Unnamed officials were quoted by various newspapers claiming that they have recovered a DVD, featuring Bukhari’s audio conversation with some suspects in Kerala. Besides, these reports claimed an audio clip, in which he chatted with a woman and a religious teacher in Pakistan, has also been retrieved. Sleuths, however, have said they will be able to frame an opinion only after they complete the investigations.
Punjab Police also joined the investigations. They are trying to verify if Bukhari is involved in drug peddling as “his uncle was recently intercepted for smuggling 3 kg of heroin”. There are no details available about which of his uncles was intercepted in drug peddling.
The focus of the investigation continues to be on how the 37-year-old man managed to marry seven women from diverse societies. Reports suggest the ‘love jihad’ angle is being probed in this case as the possible motive behind his serial lover stories.
As already reported, Bukhari was arrested from Neulpur’s Milit Nagar housing settlement, a Muslim-exclusive area with residents from Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, where he has been living since 2018 with his current wife. They were living in a rented accommodation. The woman was a schoolteacher and she had a daughter from his first husband. Within days after Bukhari’s arrest, his wife lost her job with the school management offering him no reason.
Identified as Sainaz, she has been teaching at St Xavier’s School at Chandikhole in Jajpur district for the past couple of years. A resident of Neulpur, Sainaz was a divorcee with a six-year-old daughter from her first husband. They had met each other on social media, fell in love and married.
It was while investigating his multiple marriages – seven so far, that the sleuths revealed that the sweet charming handsome man would know the art of impressing women. Apart from his mother tongue, Kashmiri, Bukhari knew six languages Hindi, Urdu, English, Bengali, Odia and Marathi. This knowledge basket would impress anybody and sleuths would credit the man for picking up and learning so many languages. His brides came from Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha.
The investigators, media reports suggest have found that Bukhari had set up a mobile phone application, which he used to stay in touch with several girls, two of them from Odisha. They apprehend as if the girls were involved in nude call chats and were paying a commission to Bukhari. One report even alleged that he had allegedly received funds from a Chinese dating App for working as an agent for it. Was there a honey-trap angle to his activities? There is, however, nothing that has been occluded so far.
The police have seized four phones and two other broken phones. All these have been sent to the cyber forensic laboratory for examination. Reports suggest that he had five SIM cards from different service providers like Airtel, BSNL and Jio. He, however, had failed to get a local Aadhaar card.
So far, the investigators have found that Bukhari had nine savings accounts in different banks, including IDBI, SBI and Central Bank with good deposits. The actual details would be known when the police would file a charge sheet against Bukhari.
Interestingly, the Jammu and Kashmir Police knew too much about the man already. They had arrested him in August 2017 after a resident, Manzoor Ahmad complained to police that Bukhari had looted him and many others. Then, the police sent a special team to Maharashtra and got him to Handwara.
Based on the interrogation, the police revealed that he had married six women – one in Odisha, two from Maharashtra, one from Barely UP, one from Srinagar and another from Handwara. Later, the police said Bukhari would abandon them after exhorting money. At the time of his arrest in 2017, police said he was also in touch with six more girls from different States and was planning to marry them.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police had located most of his brides during the investigation. One of his erstwhile wives from Barely was a journalist who told the police that Bukhari exhorted Rs 7 lakh and gold worth Rs 3 lakhs from her and later abandoned her. They had married after meeting on a matrimonial site in 2014 and took the vows a year later.
Some other wife from Rajasthan had told the sleuths that he took away four lakh rupees from her, married her and later abandoned her. Even the Odisha cops now know that Bukhari was “used to borrow money from four wives, including the one at Solapur, who is said to be a lecturer”.
The JKP already had the fake and forged neuro surgery MBBS certificates that Bukhari had claimed to have gotten from Canada, Egypt and London. This was even though he had failed in twelfth standard. In 2017, he had two Aadhaar cards.
What is sensational is that Bukhari had succeeded in practising as a doctor at several places under famous doctors from AIIMS Hospital Delhi and Rainbow Hospital, Pune. He had been even treating a cancer patient at Barely till he died of the disease. This is the other aspect that the sleuths are investigating now: Did any of the patients who were being treated by the fake doctor die? So far, there has not been any such evidence as most of the patients he would treat were his acquaintances only. He told his interrogators that he prescribed rugs after he consulted Google.
What was more interesting in the police investigation in 2017, was that Bukhari was “posing as a Pir Baba in Maharashtra and collecting money from the general public”. The modus operandi was simple: “he used to visit famous shrines and sing Qawwali and collect money”.
Efforts to reach the family in Waskura failed. Finally, a local village head, Habibullah agreed to talk. He said the family lives almost 2 km away from the main village at Batkote and they are not “very connected” with the village. Also living in his village is Ishaan’s first wife, who lives in a small house, with two children.
“We have not seen his (Ishaan, Tahir) father for many years now but we do not know where he is but we are sure his mother is at their home,” Habibillah said. “The family has interesting characters. One of them was shuttling between Kupwara and Pakistan for many years, later joined militancy and was killed by militants. One of his (Ishaan’s) cousins was arrested by police repeatedly in drug cases and is perhaps still in custody.”
Habibullah said he does not know if anybody has gone to defend Ishaan in the court. “He was always desperate to have a wealthy wife and I think that has finally landed him in a crisis.”
