AHMEDABAD: On Friday, a city civil and sessions court in Ahmedabad sentenced former BJP MLA Nalin Kotadiya and former Amreli Superintendent of Police Jagdish Patel to life in jail. The two, along with twelve other people, were found guilty of kidnapping Surat builder Shailesh Bhatt in 2018 and stealing bitcoins worth ₹32 crore from him.
Judge B.B. Jadav of the city civil and sessions court found all fourteen defendants guilty of kidnapping, extortion, and criminal conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code. The case was about the kidnapping of Shailesh Bhatt and his business partner, Kishor Paladia, on February 9, 2018. The victims were held at a home close to a Gandhinagar gas station and forced to send the bitcoin.
After Bhatt told the police about the crime, the State CID-Crime started looking into it. They said that Kotadiya, Patel, and a few Amreli police officers were behind it. The inquiry, which used CCTV video and phone records, showed that Anant Patel, the local crime section police inspector, was in charge of the operation with the help of SP Patel.
Kotadiya was a main conspirator and served as a Dhari MLA from 2012 until 2017. The court’s 547-page decision explained how the accused organized the crime, kept Bhatt against his will, and threatened him with a service pistol to get money. It was clear from the evidence that Kotadiya was directly involved in the talks, which started at ₹32 crore and ended up at around ₹12 crore. Kotadiya avoided being arrested for several months before being caught in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, in September 2018.
The court’s decision sent a strong warning against corruption, saying that it “works like a termite in society” and hurts the country’s economic stability. The judge said that the public workers who were engaged were guilty of misusing their office and committed a severe felony for their own benefit. He stressed the necessity to deal with these kinds of incidents “with a hard hand to set an example among the wrongdoers.”
One of the accused, Bipin Patel, was found not guilty because there wasn’t enough evidence. There were 172 prosecution witnesses who testified during the trial, but 92 of them became hostile. The court, on the other hand, used the other witnesses, digital transaction records, and other evidence to build the case against the defendant.
This case is over, but Bhatt is still facing separate accusations for allegedly extorting 2256 bitcoins and ₹14.50 crore in cash from another businessman, Dhaval Mavani, over a disagreement about the BitConnect Ponzi scam. The defense for the defendants said that Bhatt made up the case against them to get out of his own legal problems.
The defendants were found guilty of several crimes under the Indian Penal Code, such as kidnapping for ransom, extortion, wrongful imprisonment, and criminal conspiracy. They were also found guilty of breaking the Prevention of Corruption Act.