Jayesh Raoji Sejpal (47) a shrewd serial thief who stole jewellery worth Rs 2 crore from a suite in Jaipur’s five-star Hotel Clarks Amer, has been nabbed by Surat police in a joint operation with a team of Udaipur police. Jaipur Police Commissioner Anand Srivastava has made the announcement about the arrest of Jayesh Raoji Sejpal outside a hotel at Surat in Gujarat.
A resident of Gujarat and Mumbai alternatively, Jayesh has a unique modus operandi of targeting big fat weddings of large families held in five-star hotels. Jayesh Sejpal has cases of theft registered against him in many big cities including Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Udaipur, Kanpur, Agra, Chennai for theft from weddings in five-star hotels. Following the same pattern, he has committed 13 thefts
In the studied and methodical manoeuvre, the fluent English speaker along with other languages, Jayesh obtains booking information for VIP weddings on the pretext of booking 20-25 rooms at once by calling the reception. He then reaches the city mostly by public transport like buses and waits for the arrival of the guests to enter the five-star hotel with them. While standing around the reception, he keeps an eye on the guests to identify his prey by selecting his luggage and noting who will stay in which room and especially watching which guest is not handing over his luggage to the hotel worker.
Once the guests leave for the wedding ceremony., Jayesh gets the room opened by impersonating the occupant whose name he has memorised. He then steals the valuables and runs away. Before Udaipur and Jaipur, he has committed a similar crime in Jodhpur in the year 2013. He was first arrested in 2006 in Agra and later in Chandigarh. Though released on bail, he restarted his dirty tricks.
Before Jaipur, Jayesh had stolen Rs.15 lakh from the room of Shrestha Kalra, a resident of Delhi in Hotel Trident in Udaipur. He was caught in the CCTV footage and found wearing the same clothes as in Jaipur theft..
Jayesh had stayed in a hotel in Banipark area in Jaipur after arriving at Jaipur and committing the crime at Hotel Clarks Amer at Jaipur where he reached by autorickshaw. He entered the hotel with the guests attending the wedding of the daughter of Chhattisgarh businessman Rajeev Bothra. And selected his relative Rahul Bhatia as the target. Mumbai resident Rahul Bhatia, was visiting Jaipur to attend the marriage ceremony of Bothra’s daughter for which 48 rooms for the “destination marriage” were booked at Hotel Clark Amer in Jaipur’s Jawahar Circle police station area,
Sejpal was also found involved in high-value thefts following which a technical investigation was launched to track him down. The police have managed to recover almost all stolen pieces of jewellery from him.
