Chhota Rajan, three others sentenced to seven year imprisonment in fake passport case

The bench was headed by Special CBI judge Virender Kumar Goyal, who heard the arguments against Rajan and others, before pronouncing the quantum of punishment.

New Delhi, April 25: Gangster Chhota Rajan, along with three others was sentenced to seven years of imprisonment by a special court on Tuesday. Rajan, along with three passport officials – Jayashree Dattatray Rahate, Deepak Natvarlal Shah and Lalitha Lakshmanan were found guilty of all the charges pressed against them. The court also slapped a fine of Rs 15,000 on the all the four convicts.

The bench was headed by Special CBI judge Virender Kumar Goyal, who heard the arguments against Rajan and others, before pronouncing the quantum of punishment.

Rajan and other convicts have been booked under   sections 420 (cheating), 471 (using as genuine a forged document), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 467 (forgery of valuable security or will), 419 (cheating by impersonation) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC and section 12 (offences and penalties) of the Passport Act. The CBI further stated that Rajan booked a fake passport in 1998-99 from Bengaluru.

The three convicted passport officers are currently on bail, whereas, Rajan is under judicial custody.  The latter, apart from being convicted in the fake passport case, is facing nearly 85 cases in several courts across the nation. The former underworld don was extradited in 2015, after the Indonesian authorities decided to handover Rajan to India. The probe agencies were tracking him for the past 27 years.