Riyaz Bhati has been arrested by a team of Anti Extortion Cell of Mumbai Crime Branch, for extorting Rs 24.85 lakhs from a businessman

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New Delhi, October 26

The Mumbai Police arrested gangster Riyaz Bhati, an associate of underworld gangster Dawood Ibrahim.

Bhati has been arrested by a team of Anti Extortion Cell of Mumbai Crime Branch, for extorting Rs 24.85 lakhs from a businessman.

A businessman has lodged a complaint that Bhati had extorted Rs 24.85 lakhs by using a honey trap on him. The businessman and with Bhati live in the same neighbourhood.

The complainant told police that he became friends with Bhati and through him came in touch with a sex worker. The woman had shot a video of the complainant getting intimate and Bhati used it to extort money. Fearing defamation, the complainant paid Rs 24.85 lakhs to Bhati and got the video deleted.

However, he later found out that the woman was not a sex worker after she contacted him and told him she was Bhatti’s wife and was acting under pressure on his instructions, officials said.
Riyaz Bhati has a historysheet of forgery, extortion, land grab, and firing. In 2019, he was arrested for forging the signature of a college trustee. His name has also appeared as an accused of collecting money from licensed bars on behalf of former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh and Assistant Police Inspector Sachin Vaze.

In 2020, he was detained at the airport for flouting bail conditions and attempting to flee the country. Bhati was using two passports. He used a fake passport to travel abroad between 2007 and 2013. He had fraudulently obtained a fake passport in 2007 from the Jaipur passport office.
He had applied for passport renewal in 2006 and owing to the number of cases registered against him, the Mumbai police refused to issue a no-objection certificate due to which he colluded with an agent in Jaipur and obtained a passport with the help of forged documents.

His name in the fake passport was Bhati Phoolji and his date of birth changed from 1962 to 1968. Subsequently, he managed to get an original passport in his name in 2013, which he has been using since then. Bhati’s wife had filed a complaint with the Mumbai police in September last year alleging that he had forced her to have sex with his business associates, officials further said.