On 31st August, Ahmedabad Police arrested one individual identified as Mohammad Shehbaz in the case of theft on a Vande Bharat train in Gujarat. Now it has come to the fore that he is also involved in a ‘Love Jihad’ case. According to the initial reports, he is believed to have used a false Hindu name to trap and marry a Hindu girl. The Aligarh Police had booked the accused in the case and now he has been handed over to the Ahmedabad Police.
It is worth noting that Shahbaz was detained by Ahmedabad police on 31st August in connection with a theft on the Vande Bharat train. A fake ID card bearing the name ‘Major Harshit Chaudhary’ was also discovered in his possession. Shehbaz is a resident of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. He not only created a fake Aadhaar card with a Hindu name, but he also preserved a false army officer card despite not being in the army. When the police arrested him and interrogated him further, they discovered that he had used his false identity to deceptively maary a Hindu woman.
The accused is believed to have stolen a trolley bag of one of the passengers from the Vande Bhart train. After reviewing the train’s CCTV footage and passenger chart, the police found that the accused had reserved a seat under the name ‘Harshit Manoj Singh Chaudhary’. The police followed him away and detained him, and when questioned, he confessed to having generated a bogus ID of ‘Harshit Chaudhary’. Furthermore, it was discovered that he had joined the Army in 2015 but was expelled from the Army being unfit as of June 2024.
Further inquiry revealed that Shehbaz utilized a fake Aadhaar card with a Hindu identity, a PAN card, and a false ID card of an army major for railway and plane travel. Not only that, but he also entrapped a Hindu girl originally from Jharkhand by adopting a Hindu identity. A case has been filed against him in Aligarh in this regard.
One of the women called the police amid the investigation and exposed the accused
In a conversation with OpIndia, PI H Garhvi said that during the interrogation one of the women called him. The woman told the police that Harshit Chaudhary was her husband and had not returned home for a long time. So he called his (accused’s) phone number. The police later told the girl that the person she believed to be her husband was actually not Harshit but Mohammad Shehbaz. The girl eventually said that she never knew that the man she had married was a Muslim. She then lodged a complaint against Shehbaz at a police station in Aligarh.
According to a report by Dainik Bhaskar, the girl went to Aligarh’s Banna Devi police station and lodged a complaint on September 8th. She said in the complaint that she originally hails from Chaibasa in Jharkhand. Mohammad Shehbaz contacted her through shaadi.com and identified himself as ‘Harshit Chowdhury’, claiming to be an army man. He also created a fake Aadhaar card and an ID card of an Army major to obtain the woman’s trust.
After that, Shehbaz called the girl to Aligarh and got married to her as per Hindu rituals on March 5th, 2023 in a temples and then took a rented house in Aligarh and made the girl stay there.
The girl said in the police complaint that after marriage, Shehbaz’s behavior changed and he left her alone. He told her that he wasn’t allowed to go on leave by the Army authorities. In addition, she said that he forcefully established sexual relations with her and threatened to kill her if she refused. Further, during the police investigation, it was found that Shehbaz is already married and that he has two children.
Bank account seized, IT officials informed
The Aligarh Police registered a case on the complaint of the victim and now he has been handed over to the Ahmedabad Police. As per the police, he had cheated on 24 women from different parts of the country using fake Hindu identities. He met working women on social media sites or matrimonial sites and then forced them to have sexual relations. He then used to loot the women monetarily. The police exposed this modus operandi of the accused during the investigation to which the latter gave confirmation.
The Police further investigated the bank accounts of the accused to discover that he had used a fake Hindu identity to create an account. The police also found that large monetary transactions had recently happened through the account. The bank accounts have been seized and the IT officials have been informed.
The police said that since he was in the Army, he knew all the etiquette which helped him gain the trust of the victim women. Further investigations into the case are underway.
