MUMBAI: Monday evening saw high drama play out inside the sea-facing police quarters at Carter Road in Bandra . A team of Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) officers laid a trap at a cop’s flat following a real estate agent’s complaint that two officers from Khar police station were helping three men blackmail and extort Rs 50 lakh from him.

The 15-minute action-packed filmi sequence climaxed with assistant police inspector Subhash Samant fleeing after jumping off the AC duct of his first-floor flat along with the first instalment of the bribe amount of Rs 10 lakh and property documents. ACB sleuths had packed one of the two bags with genuine notes of Rs 20,000; the rest was fake currency. The other bag contained original property papers of a plot on Carter Road.

The ACB has invoked the Prevention of Corruption Act and IPC sections for extortion, threat and blackmail. Pornography charges are also likely.

The cops have formed two teams to nab the accused. While one team has launched a manhunt for API Samant and police inspector Mahendra Narlekar, the other is looking for three men identified as Vicky Arora, Mahesh Kamble and Robin Gonsalves, a goon from Khar Danda.

The complainant is a young estate agent from Khar who alleged in his police complaint that Samant and Narlekar had been harassing him. “When the complainant met Samant at Khar police station recently, he was told that a 20-year-old woman had filed a gangrape complaint against him. They then began to summon him,’’ said Praveen Dixit, director general of police, ACB.

Samant told the complainant that the victim had given an application to Narlekar stating that the complainant had spiked her drink and she had been gangraped by three to four persons, including the complainant. “This application was marked as also sent to the chief minister, the home minister and the Mumbai police commissioner. In reality, it had not even reached Khar police station’s senior inspector. Investigators have learnt that the accused had fabricated the application to frighten the complainant,’’ said Vishwas Nangre Patil, additional commissioner of police, ACB.

The complainant met Narlekar and Samant at Khar police station. The duo said if he wanted to evade a gangrape complaint, he should speak to Vicky Arora, who is known to the complainant. Arora told him to cough up Rs 50 lakh and transfer a plot at Carter Road in his name.

Investigators have learnt that the complainant had brought the plot from Arora for Rs 25 lakh in 2008. As land prices soared, Arora demanded his property back, which the complainant kept refusing till 2012. “It appears that Arora along with his two friends, Robin Gonsolves and Mahesh Kamble, in connivance with the two police officers, fabricated the fake gangrape application and started threatening the complainant,’’ added Nangre.

He finally approached the ACB. The ACB, which has been working on this complaint for nearly a fortnight, recorded enough material evidence and tapped a conversation of cops demanding money from the complainant.

Around 6.15pm on Monday, the complainant told Samant that he had arranged the first instalment of Rs 10 lakh and the property documents. He subsequently reached Samant’s first-floor flat on Carter Road.

The complainant soon gave a signal to the waiting ACB team, which initially sent a woman police officer who identified herself from the special branch. No sooner did Samant open the door than a team of six ACB sleuths tried to barge in. Samant, a six-foot-tall body builder, managed to push aside the officers and bolted the door. He abused the complainant and ran towards the AC duct along with the two bags and before the ACB sleuths could break open the flat’s door, he jumped off it and fled.

The police have recorded the statement of one of Samant’s relatives who was in the flat at that time and witnessed the incident. The ACB has seized Samant’s car and the video of the complainant.