Wendy Albano, a 51-year-old American socialite and interior designer from South Tampa, Florida, was discovered dead in her Bangkok hotel room on February 13, 2012, twelve years ago. According to the post-mortem report, she had been strangled and stabbed multiple times in the neck and torso. Even though the Thailand Police started their investigation right away, it would take two years for the accused to be apprehended in September 2014 in the Parbhani district of Maharashtra.
Hours before Albano’s body was discovered, the Thailand Police observed a “Indian man” leaving the Fraser Suites Sukhumvit hotel in Bangkok when reviewing CCTV footage. Thailand Police knew the late-twentieth-century suspect, Ritesh Narpatraj Sanghvi, as Albano’s “business partner.” A Delhi extradition court issued a non-bailable arrest warrant for Sanghvi after learning that he had allegedly left for India just hours after Albano’s body was found. The Indian government was notified of this development.
Soon, the Mumbai Police Crime Branch and its extradition cell swung into action, trying to locate Sanghvi. They learnt that his father had registered a missing persons complaint with D B Marg Police in Mumbai, stating that his son had been missing since February 8, 2012 – days before Albano was murdered.
The investigating agencies also found that Sanghvi had befriended Albano on Facebook and she had come to meet him twice between 2010 and 2012. Sanghvi, who was a computer seller and a compulsive internet addict, was cautious after the crime, the police claimed. He restricted his internet usage, stopped sending money to his family through a net banking facility and never used the same handset to contact his family.
In early 2014, in a bid to garner more information about Sanghvi’s whereabouts, a special police squad visited his parents’ house in South Mumbai posing as courier company employees and telephone company representatives. The police learnt that Sanghvi was in India but did not know where.
They then made inquiries with his friends and relatives and learnt that they had received calls from Sanghvi from Gangakhed in Maharashtra’s Parbhani district, but never from the same handset. This led the police to suspect that Sanghvi was running a mobile shop that would grant him access to different cell phones.
With the trail leading them to Gangakhed, the police soon located Sanghvi. A further probe revealed that he was staying in a rented room in Gangakhed under an assumed name and had his own store in town, Kaveri Mobiles.
Sanghvi surrendered before the Mumbai police on September 29, 2014. As per police, his interrogation revealed that after coming to India, he spent some days in New Delhi, Nagpur and Nanded and then moved to Gangakhed town.
On October 1 that year, Sanghvi obtained transit remand from a magistrate court in Mumbai and was produced before the Delhi magistrate court, which subsequently sent him to judicial custody. The Delhi magistrate court completed the probe and passed the final extradition enquiry report on June 1, 2017, and the same was communicated to the Thailand Embassy which had requested the same.
The single-judge bench of Justice Mukta Gupta of the Delhi High Court on January 7, 2019, upheld the said order and also dismissed Sanghvi’s plea to quash the July 2017 Ministry of External Affairs letter to the Thailand Embassy conveying its decision to extradite Sanghvi to face murder trial.
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