Two days on, police still hunt for shooter

HT has learnt that the police is now grappling with the fact that the two men arrested from the spot of the murder ran together in a completely different direction from Gautam to possibly distract and divide the police team that was present at the time of the killing.

MUMBAI: While the Mumbai police has arrested three persons for conspiring and carrying out the killing of former Maharashtra minister Baba Siddique, the two main people who hold the key to the killing are still at large. They are Shiva Kumar Gautam, a resident of Bharaich in Uttar Pradesh, who actually fired the six bullets that killed the Nationalist Congress Party (AP) leader and Shubham Lonkar the man who hired Gautam and two others for the execution. Without Gautam and Lonkar the Mumbai police would be hard pressed to prove its case about the involvement of jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi.

Two days on, police still hunt for shooter

HT has learnt that the police is now grappling with the fact that the two men arrested from the spot of the murder at Kherwadi in Bandra (east) Dharamraj Kashyap and Germail Singh ran together in a completely different direction from Shiva Gautam to possibly distract and divide the police team that was present at the time of the killing. It is also learnt that Gautam who lived in Pune working in a scrap shop, is no longer in Maharashtra.

On Monday, 48 hours after the murder, the police claim that the murder plot was hatched in Pune by Shubham Lonkar and his brother Praveen who has since been arrested. The brothers, investigators say, provided the money— ₹50,000 to each of the three men, weapons and logistic support. The men had been sent to Mumbai a month ago and housed in Kurla from where they conducted their reconnaissance.

“This (the murder) is a complete failure on the part of the Mumbai police-- they had no intelligence about the planning or that the shooters had entered city limits, and subsequently too we failed to nab the main shooter,” conceded a senior IPS officer.

This happened, the officer said because the police force has lost its network of informants. Police are now scrutinising the CCTV footage in and around Bandra (east) to understand the possible route used by him to escape. “We have had little luck so far,” the officer added.

Lonkar’s arms training in Azerbaijan

But it’s not just the Mumbai police that has been remiss. Shubham Lonkar who allegedly recruited the three men was arrested by the Akola police in January this year under the Arms Act for supplying weapons to other miscreants. During that investigation the police found evidence that he had been in touch through WhatsApp with Lawrence Bishnoi lodged at Sabarmati jail and his brother Anmol Bishnoi who allegedly operates in concert with Lawrence from outside of India.

The Akot Police in Akola had also seized three pistols and 11 live cartridges from him. Shubham Lonkar and his brother Pravin who belongs to Nivri Budruk village in Akot, were among the 10 men arrested in that case. On Monday, the Akola police revisited the case and managed to connect with eight of them. The two men they could not locate were the Lonkar brothers.

Shubham Rameshwar Lonkar, 30, who was interrogated by ACP Anmol Mittal in the Arms’ Act case, told him that two years ago he had wanted to join the Indian Army as he was approaching the eligibility cut-off age but on account of some irregularities in the recruitment process that year, he could not join the armed forces. At the recruitment drive, he said, he met a person identified as a certain Bajra who told him that if Shubham wanted to work for the country, he could introduce him to somebody who also works for the country which was Lawrence Bishnoi who has been in various jails since 2014.

“After he was introduced to Bishnoi, Lonkar even formed a WhatsApp group with some other men in the area where he spoke of the need to eliminate all rapists,” said a police officer close to the interrogation.

Lonkar also allegedly told the Akola police that after joining the Bishnoi gang he had been sent to two training camps in Azerbaijan and Nepal where he was trained in handling sophisticated weapons. The weapons used in Siddique’s murder were imported 9 mm Glocks. Of the six bullets that Shivkumar Gautam fired three bullets hit Siddique, two of them were lodged in his car while a sixth bullet injured a pedestrian.

The Lonkar brothers were released on bail in February this year, a month after their arrest, and shortly after the Akola police stopped keeping tabs on them. Mumbai police say prima facie it now appears that Shubham Lonkar organised Baba Siddique’s killing but they will need to locate him first to make that case.