Murder Accused Nabbed After 27 Years, Police Used Wedding Video To Hunt Culprit; Read The Case Details

Navsari: In an extraordinary case of old technology aiding modern policing, Navsari police have arrested a fugitive who was on the run for 27 years after committing murder in 1998. The breakthrough came through a digitised wedding video from 1996, the only visual clue available to investigators.

The accused, Prabhudas Sadhu, now 61, had been absconding since May 1998 after he jumped parole. On April 4, 1998, he allegedly killed his friend Paresh Solanki with an axe following a trivial dispute and dumped the body in an agricultural field in Gandevi taluka. Sadhu was arrested on April 13 from Karchareliya village in Surat district and lodged in Navsari sub-jail on April 17. He was granted parole but didn’t return, vanishing without a trace.

With no photograph on record, tracking Sadhu proved nearly impossible, until a few months ago, when police reopened the case and traced a 1996 wedding video from Mahuva that Sadhu had attended. The footage, preserved on a VHS cassette, was successfully digitised and used to extract an image of the then 33-year-old fugitive.

Armed with this visual, Navsari police launched a state-wide temple search, as Sadhu was suspected to have adopted the identity of a temple priest. Officers, disguised, visited nearly 200 temples across Mahisagar and Patan districts. After months of searching, they finally located Sadhu at a temple in Shankeshwar village in Patan district.

Investigators learned that Sadhu had moved frequently over the past 27 years, living in temples and ashrams across Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Bihar. Before his arrest, he had served for 10 years at the Jayeshwar temple in Varetha, and fled when he sensed police were close.

Navsari Superintendent of Police Sushil Agrawal confirmed the arrest, stating, “Our teams worked hard and got success. We had no photograph of the accused. Our team worked for nine months to locate him. They first contacted his close friends and learnt that the accused had visited a friend’s wedding at Karcharaliya village in 1996. Police tracked down the person concerned and obtained a video cassette of the event. We got an image of the accused from when he was 33 years old.”

Sadhu, once an assistant to a magician in Navsari, had built an entirely new life under a religious identity. His arrest marks the end of a 27-year-long manhunt.