Hyderabad: The Cyberabad police have arrested a pseudo-IPS officer allegedly involved in several cases of extortion and kidnapping. The accused, Naga Raju Karthik Raghu Varma aka Karthik, 25, is from Bhimavaram in Andhra Pradesh.
The police seized a country-made pistol, nine rounds and other material, all worth Rs 2 lakh from his possession.
The accused was passionate about working as a police officer since his college days. Previously, he had appeared for various positions in the police but never made it through. Eventually, he got addicted to earning easy money by cheating innocent people disguised as police officer.
Karthik recently moved to Hyderabad and purchased police uniforms, handcuffs, lathi, pistol pouch, etc from a dealer in the Old City. He then began threatening people posing as an inspector. He kidnapped and extorted money from an elderly man in Gandhinagar.
Naga Raju was previously involved and arrested in eight similar cases in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Jharkhand. However, he was arrested and later detained under the Preventive Detention Act, by the Hyderabad police, in May 2022 and was only recently released.
While he was in jail, he came in contact with Yashwanth, accused in cases of cyber crimes, who gave him the contact of an illegal weapon dealer.
In January, he went to Kunda village, Jharkhand and purchased a country-made pistol with nine rounds for the purpose of extortion and other offences.
In the meantime, he came into contact with, Bikkudar Das, an ex-Army officer working for a security service, where he learned of Army ranks, uniforms, batches and other vital information in discussions over time. He then used the information to purchase uniforms of the major rank in the PARASF regiment.
The accused then hatched a plan to cheat, a person for a ransom of Rs 14,00,000. They kidnapped Gosla Jyothishana wife of GVSD Prasad and initially extorted Rs 30,000 before they were apprehended.
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