Former top cop Param Bir Singh was Antilia bomb scare mastermind: Anil Deshmukh

NAGPUR: Senior Nationalist Congress Party (SP) leader and former Maharashtra minister Anil Deshmukh has now trained his guns on the former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh, alleging that he was the mastermind behind the Antilia bomb scare and the murder of businessman Mansukh Hiren in Mumbai in 2021.
Talking to media persons on Monday, Deshmukh claimed that deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was in the Opposition at the time, had struck a deal with Singh to protect the then police commissioner from arrest if he “levelled allegations against me” to topple the Maha Vikas Aghadi government.
The senior NCP (SP) leader claimed that during his tenure as Maharashtra’s home minister, an inquiry had revealed that Singh was the mastermind behind the bomb kept in a Mahindra Scorpio found near the Mumbai residence of industrialist Mukesh Ambani and also the killing of the vehicle owner, Hiren. “Singh, along with his other accomplices, had carried out this,” he said.
The prime suspect in the case, police officer Sachin Vaze, reported solely to Singh, bypassing his superiors, Deshmukh claimed. “Furthermore, the Innova car of the commissioner’s office was utilised in the Antilia bomb incident,” he said.
Upon discovering Singh’s role as the mastermind, two additional chief secretaries in the state home ministry, Manu Kumar Srivastava and Anand Limaye, and principal secretary Vinit Agrawal, met with the police commissioner in Deshmukh’s presence and decided to transfer him as he was not giving proper information and misleading them in the case, the former home minister claimed.
“We also told him that the investigation of the case would now be taken over from the Mumbai police and handed over to the Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS). This decision irritated him, and he left the room abruptly,” said Deshmukh. The then MVA government adopted a stricter approach, suspending Singh and terminating five police officers, including Vaze, in March 2021.
“Politics began during this period when the National Investigation Agency (NIA) took over the inquiry,” said Deshmukh. Singh was supposed to be arrested by the NIA three years ago and, to avoid this, he “surrendered himself to Fadnavis” and the central government, he added.
On March 18, 2021, Singh unexpectedly travelled to Delhi to meet senior officials of the union government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Deshmukh said. Upon returning from Delhi, Singh accused him of instructing Vaze to collect ₹100 crore from bars and restaurants in Mumbai each month, he added. The allegations were levelled at a time when the NIA was investigating the Antilia case.
On April 6, 2021, Deshmukh resigned as home minister after the Bombay high court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the charges against him. On November 2 that year, Deshmukh was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money-laundering investigation into the extortion charges against him. He was granted bail by the Bombay high court in 2022.
Claiming that he had got a clean chit in the graft case, Deshmukh on Monday again dared Fadnavis to make the Justice Chandiwal Commission report public. “I have been requesting them to make the report public, but Fadnavis is diverting the issue by saying the report was submitted during the MVA government. I again urge Fadnavis to make that report public,” Deshmukh said.
Meanwhile, state BJP chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule dismissed the allegations, asserting that it was a tactic to defame Fadnavis. He also questioned how a leader in the Opposition could request such a thing from a police officer during the MVA regime.
Singh called Deshmukh’s allegations against him “bogus” and “a figment of imagination.” He claimed that Deshmukh’s son Salil had met him in March-April 2021 and apologised to him, saying that his father would make him director general of police if he withdrew his allegations.
Singh said he’s ready to undergo a narco analysis test to establish the truth, provided former DGP Sanjay Pandey and Salil Deshmukh also undergo the test on the same day.
Deshmukh and Fadnavis have been trading barbs and allegations ever since rationalist Shyam Manav claimed on July 20 that the former had been approached to rat out against Uddhav Thackeray, Aaditya Thackeray, Ajit Pawar and Anil Parab during the MVA regime in 2021.