Former Gujarat top cop DG Vanzara's revenue officer son caught taking bribe

Ahmedabad: Arjun Vanzara, son of former top Gujarat Police official, the controversial D.G. Vanzara, was on Tuesday caught red-handed by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) while accepting a bribe of Rs 75,000, officials said.

Arjun Vanzara, who is a mamlatdar (land revenue official who serves a custodian of land records and is empowered to update them) in Vadodara Rural, is learnt to have sought Rs 100,000 to strike off a bogus entry of land deal in his jurisdiction. However, the transaction was finalised for Rs 75,000.

According to police sources, he was caught red-handed while accepting the money from his accomplice and deputy mamlatdar in his office Jaswantsinh Hajure. The ACB is also learned to have also recovered Rs 3.27 lakh in cash from his car.

D.G. Vanzara had been linked to several allegedly staged shootouts in Gujarat between October 2002 and December 2006. Along with other officers, he has been facing charges of being part of plotting a number of such killings, including that of Mumbai college girl Ishrat Jahan and three others in 2004, Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kauserbi in 2005 and his associate Tulsiram Prajapati in 2006. Vanzara was jailed for eight years since 2007, before getting a bail in February 2015 on the condition that he would not enter Gujarat.

This forced him to stay put in Mumbai and it is only after a special CBI court granted him permission to enter his home state that he returned to Gujarat in April last. BJP president Amit Shah, a minister in the Narendra Modi cabinet when the latter was chief minister, was also arrested in the case.

Arjun's cousin Manjita Vanzara is a serving IPS officer in Gujarat. The ACB, meanwhile, is questioning Arjun and Harjure.