The police have arrested a 37-year-old man, wanted in several cases registered across the country, for allegedly cheating people by posing as a doctor, officials said on Saturday.
The accused had worked with as many as 11 different hospitals, clinics and nursing homes in the last eight years and received salaries of around Rs 1.5 lakh per month by posing as a doctor, they said.
Manish Kaul was involved in 27 criminal cases, including cases of cheating and fraud, and was arrested from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, they said, adding he had also cheated the two women whom he had married.
He had also escaped from custody of Delhi Police's 3rd Battalion in Mumbai in 2019, police said. He used many aliases, including Varun Kaul and Vikrant Bhagat, they said.
Cases against Kaul were registered in Delhi, Mumbai, Panchkula, Goa, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Faridabad, Jaipur, Kerala, Ambala and Kashipur in Uttarakhand, police said.
His crimes include impersonation, cheating, forgery, attempt to murder, possession of illegal arms and theft, they said.
Police received information about Kaul and narrowed down the search to Shastri Nagar in Meerut. However, they were unable to track his exact location, officials said.
While checking his call detail records, police got the number of a food delivery boy who told them about the place where he delivered the order.
On Friday, a trap was laid and Kaul was apprehended from a nursing home in Shastri Nagar, a senior police officer said.
"During interrogation, Kaul revealed that his father Brij Bhushan Kaul used to run a medicine factory in Ambala Cantt area. He completed his schooling from Ambala Cantt and took admission in Jallandhar in Bachelor in Unani and Homeopathic in 2006, but did not finish his studies," senior police official (Crime) Shibesh Singh said.
In 2002, he started helping his father in their medicine factory, police said.
During that period, he was charged in a case of cheating at Saharanpur as his company had cheated Rs 50,000 from one of his dealers, the police said.
From 2002 to 2008, he was booked in several cases of cheating while running his medicine factory, police said.
In 2007, he came in contact with a school teacher at Patel Nagar in Delhi through a newspaper advertisement. He posed as a doctor and married the woman. He also had a daughter with her, they said.
In November 2014, he created a profile at a matrimonial site claiming to be an unmarried doctor working as physician at a hospital in Sangrur in Punjab, the police said, adding he also claimed that his father was also doctor and a retired Navy officer.
A woman doctor, who was a resident of Ashok Vihar in Delhi, got in touch with him after seeing the advertisement following which they got married in 2015 at Chhatarpur and also had a son, police said.
However, she later found about his activities and registered a case against him under charges of cheating, forgery, threatening, MCI Act, DMC Act etc at Moti Nagar police station on March 22, 2018, Mr Singh said.
When he came to her clinic with a loaded pistol to kill her, she called the police. He tried to escape after firing a shot at the police, but was arrested, police said.
On November 27, 2019, he absconded from police custody of the 3rd Battalion in Mumbai while he was being brought back after production in various courts at Ernakulum (Kerala), Panji and Mapusa (Goa). A case was registered at Vasai Road police station in Mumbai in connection with this, Mr Singh said.
After running from police custody, he reached Pali district in Rajasthan where his father was residing and opened a hospital, police said.
He stayed with his father for about five months till his father was arrested in a cheating case. Later, he settled in Gurgaon and around a year back changed his identity and started working at a Meerut hospital using the alias Vikrant Bhagat, the police said.
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