Real life cop: Suneil Shetty hunts for hit-and-run culprit

A reel-life cop on many occasions in the past, Bollywood actor-producer Suneil Shetty is playing sleuth in real life following the death of scriptwriter Vishal Shah. Shah was killed in a hit and run accident on July 21 after being hit by a speeding car while he was changing a flat tyre at Bandra Reclamation, near the Bandra-Worli sealink. Investigations by the police into the incident, which occurred at 3 am, had hit a roadblock because there was no eye-witness or clear CCTV footage that could enable them to nail the culprits. Seeing no headway in the case, actors Suniel Shetty, Iqbal Khan (from Fun2ssh) and Nasir Khan; and Mohan Azaad, the dialogue and screenplay writer for Chandni Bar, did some sleuthing around and found a credible lead — that the car that knocked down their friend was an Audi Q5, according to a report in the Times of India. They also found that the car that hit Shah was either white or silver coloured and had sustained a damaged headlamp. [caption id=“attachment_1081167” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Suneil Shetty and a few other Bollywood friends have been helping cops find Vishal Shah’s culprits. Reuters[/caption] Shetty had met Shah only a few times. He told The Telegraph that Vishal had been working on a script for him. “He was working on a script for me. The next I know, he has been mowed down by a car on the Bandra Worli Sealink. I could not but help step in,” Shetty  told The Telegraph. Shah, a protégé of Azaad, was reportedly just 50 metres from the Bandra Worli Sealink when the Maruti Esteem he was driving had a flat tyre near Bandra Reclamation. “It was around 3.30 in the morning and Vishal had taken his friend Siddharth, who had come down from Australia, for a spin around the city. Neither of them was drunk. They thought the early hour would be good as they wouldn’t face any traffic,” Azaad told The Telegraph. Shah was with his friend Siddharth Tirodkar, 29, who was visiting from Australia. According to TOI, Tirodkar told the cops that everything happened so suddenly that he did not see the car that hit his friend. “If the person whose car hit Vishal had taken the trouble to take him to Lilavati Hospital, just three minutes away, the boy would have lived,” TV actor Iqbal Khan told the TOI. Drawing a parallel to the hit-and-run case of his friend Salman Khan, Shetty told The Telegraph that if Salman had taken the injured to hospital soon after his Land Cruiser ran over a labourer sleeping on the pavement, he might have gotten away with milder charges. Salman had surrendered to the police eight hours after his Land Cruiser ran over Nurullah Sharif, a day labourer sleeping on the pavement. “If he had taken them to a hospital instead of running away, he would not have had to face such serious charges today,” Shetty told The Telegraph, adding, “Salman is a wonderful person, the most generous and good-hearted guy I know. Yet, a momentary weakness has led him to this situation. There is a lesson in it for everyone.”