Duo tries to extort ice cream factory owner of Rs1L, booked

According to the police, on Friday night around 11.30pm, two armed men came to Basai Enclave in 37D. One of them entered the factory premises and threatened the labourers.

Two men, one of whom was a suspected member of the former Sandeep Gadoli gang, allegedly threatened the employees of an ice cream factory in Sector 37D on Friday night. They fired in the air to intimidate the staffers and demanded ₹1 lakh as protection money, the police said on Saturday.

Two armed men entered the premises of Anmol ice cream factory in Sector 37D and allegedly threatened the workers. (Yogendra Kumar/HT)

According to the police, on Friday night around 11.30pm, two armed men came to Basai Enclave in 37D. One of them entered the factory premises and threatened the labourers. He also allegedly assaulted two of the staff members when they refused to share the mobile number of their employer. He threatened to kill all the workers of the factory if the employer did not pay ₹1 lakh to him, the police said, adding that the two men left after firing in the air.

Prakash Singh (63), owner of Anmol Ice Cream factory, said on Friday night, he had returned home around 8pm. Both his sons, who handled the operations of the factory, had returned home around 10pm. Singh was sleeping, when one of his workers called him and informed him about the incident.

“I rushed to the factory. There, I saw that the glass door of my office was broken and two of the mobile phones of my staff members were lying damaged on the floor. The incident had shaken my staffers, who had halted their work,” Singh said.

Singh called the police control room and informed the police about the incident. Following this, the station house inspector (SHO) of Sector 10A police station and a team of crime unit reached the spot and scanned the CCTV cameras.

“One of the assailants thrashed the guards and introduced himself as ‘Moni’ — a sharpshooter of the defunct Sandeep Gadoli gang. He asked for protection money and said he had been maintaining a low profile ever since Gadoli was killed in a police encounter in 2016. We are trying to identify the accused, who will soon be nabbed,” said Shamsher Singh, assistant commissioner of police (crime).

A case under sections 384 (extortion), 452 (trespassing) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was registered at the Sector 10A police station on Saturday.

Gadoli, a gangster who had multiple criminal cases registered against him in Haryana, was shot dead in an encounter in a hotel in Andheri, Mumbai, in February 2016. Since his death, the gang had disbanded, with several of its members being arrested or remaining absconding.