Ahmedabad:
A debt-ridden hotelier in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district faked his death in a car accident to claim life insurance worth Rs 1.26 crore. The meticulous plan, however, was foiled by the police. Dalpat Singh Parmar’s three accomplices have been arrested and he is on the run.
According to police, burnt remains of a car were found in Vadgam village on Friday. Inside the vehicle were the charred remains of a human body. When police checked the details of the vehicle registration number, they found it belonged to Dalpat Singh Parmar, 40. His family members confirmed that the body belonged to him, but the police smelled a rat. Samples from the body in the car were sent for forensic tests and the results did not match the samples collected from the family’s members.
As police dug deeper, they found Parmar had taken huge loans to build a hotel and was neck-deep in debt. Looking for a way out, he planned to fake his death in a car accident so that his family could get an accident cover worth Rs 1 crore and an insurance payout of Rs 23 lakh. The plan was that Parmar would go into hiding till his family received the money, the investigation revealed. The hotelier roped in some relatives, including his brother, for help.
The big challenge was arranging the body that could be passed off as his. Parmar and the others decided to steal a body from the nearby cremation ground. It must be pointed out here that some Hindu sects in Gujarat bury their dead instead of cremating them.
Four accused, including Parmar, entered the cremation ground late at night and dug out a body buried four months back. This body was then put into Parmar’s car and the vehicle was set on fire to stage the accident and his death.
When it was established that the body in the car did not belong to Parmar, police faced the big question: whose body was it? When they scanned CCTV footage of the village cremation ground, they found four men moving a body at night. When the accused seen in the video were grilled, they admitted to putting the dug-out corpse into Parmar’s car and setting it on fire. The stolen body was later identified as that of Ramesh Solanki, who died four months back.
Banaskantha police superintendent Akshayraj Makwana told the media that the police have found that Parmar and the other accused stole the body, put it into the car and set the vehicle on fire to claim insurance money in the hotelier’s name. “Four accused were part of the conspiracy. Three have been arrested and we are looking for the main accused,” he said.
Inputs by Mahendra Prasad
