Namesake on terror list, Kerala godman on the run

Swami Amritachaitanya. The 2004 Interpol alert for him and his sidekick Saifuddeen Ali Kannu who fled with him, says both are wanted in Dubai for fraud and mentions his date of birth as 18 March, 1973.

The other Santosh Madhavan, who too had a red corner Interpol notice for him pending since 1993, was declared wanted by the Mumbai Police after his brother Trikesh Madhavan was arrested following the seizure of some imported weapons soon after the Mumbai blasts. The brother named him as the kingpin and he was charged, in police language, of a “criminal conspiracy to commit terrorist acts with the use of sophisticated fire arms, with the intention to adversely affect communal harmony”. This Santosh Madhavan was born on 7 June, 1960, and UAE cops had finally caught him in Abu Dhabi by end-2003, at the instance of the Interpol in India.

Things began getting tough for Santosh Madhavan alias Swami Amritachaitanya after a Malayalam magazine put out a cover story saying the Swami running his celebrity-studded posh ashram in Kochi was his gunrunner namesake, and mistakenly superimposed the latter’s profile on him. With almost the entire local media taking it up together, the man vanished, only to go to both the cops and the CBI in Kochi a couple of days ago offering to surrender, while maintaining he was not the other Madhavan. Neither the cops nor the CBI took him in and he went away.

A day later, the cops had some afterthought and began raiding the ashram and looking up his suspected benami real estate deals, claiming they were following up media reports. They claimed they had nothing yet to arrest him for. Remarkably, the local cops say they are ascertaining only if he was actually the wanted gunrunner, as was being reported.

The investigating officer, Shaneel Babu, claimed to have no clue if there really were two different Interpol red corner alerts for both the Madhavans still available on the Internet, that both were distanced by some 13 years in age—or even that that the gunrunner Madhavan had a brother that this one did not. He also did not want to comment on why the police began raiding Madhavan’s premises after letting him off when he voluntarily offered to surrender a day earlier.

Senior cops did not wish to comment on the possibility of arresting this Madhavan since there is a Dubai Interpol alert out for him, and India has an extradition agreement in force with the UAE.