Feared gangster Deepak ‘Boxer’ brought to India from Mexico

Boxer switched to crime after a failed career in pugilism and eventually ran the criminal group operated by gangster Jitender Gogi after his 2021 murder.

Top Delhi gangster Deepak Pahal “Boxer”, who was nabbed in Mexico’s Cancun in a coordinated operation by Indian, US and the south American country’s security forces, was on Wednesday sent to eight-day police remand, hours after he landed in the Capital.

Authorities with gangster Deepak Boxer (centre) in New Delhi on Wednesday. (HT PHOTO)

Boxer, one of Delhi’s most dreaded gangsters, was brought to on a Turkish Airlines flight, which landed at around 5.45am on Wednesday at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. From there, he was taken straight to the Patiala House court in the New Delhi area, said police.

The 27-year-old was initially scheduled to reach New Delhi on Tuesday morning, but his arrival was delayed due to immigration clearance issues at Cancun airport, said HGS Dhaliwal, Delhi’s special commissioner of police (special cell).

Boxer, who got his moniker after a failed career in pugilism, switched to crime and eventually ran the criminal group operated by gangster Jitender Gogi after his 2021 murder.

“After committing multiple murders, he procured a fake passport issued in the name of one Ravi Antil of Moradabad (Uttar Pradesh) and took a flight from Kolkata on January 6. He reached Mexico in the first week of March via Almaty, Istanbul, Panama City, Port of Spain, Paramaribo and Costa Rica. Boxer’s intention behind reaching Mexico was to reach the US, with the help of human traffickers, where he would join his other associates. From there, he had planned to run his organised crime group in Delhi and neighbouring states on the lines of the Mumbai underworld. As soon as he came to know that he was under the radar of the FBI and Mexico Police, he destroyed his counterfeit passport and kept changing his location. In the meanwhile, he was in contact with his associates to get another fake passport, to somehow reach the USA,” Dhaliwal said.

Under an exercise known as Operation Mexico, Indian law enforcement agencies, Interpol, the office of the legal attaché of the US Embassy in New Delhi, and Mexican immigration and law enforcement agencies nabbed Boxer from the Cancun airport on Sunday.

“American and Mexican authorities cooperated with us in tracing, tracking and apprehending the fugitive gangster, on the basis of live inputs given to them by us,” Dhaliwal said.

Another senior officer of the special cell, wishing not to be named, said that the gangster was contacted by the son of one Naresh (single name) of Haryana to come to the US to kill a business rival.

“Naresh was in the liquor business with his brother. When one of his rivals of the same business – Kishan Dadu (presently lodged in a Haryana jail) — allegedly killed his brother and brother-in-law, he fled to Australia. He also managed to shift his son Sagar to the US. It was Sagar, who hired Boxer to eliminate Dadu and the local informers involved in his uncles’ murder. Sagar also arranged the second forged passport in someone else’s name for Boxer, along with some other Donkers in Mexico, for his smooth passage to the US,” the officer said.

The officer also said that the special cell will interrogate Boxer in connection with other murder cases in which he was named the accused.

The police will also probe his role in the conspiracy of murder of Punjabi folk singer Sidhu Moosewala, the officer said, as he is associated with Lawrence Bishnoi and Canada-based gangster Goldy Brar.