Amid spate of attacks, Lawrence Bishnoi’s brother on NIA’s radar
The federal agency has included Anmol Bishnoi in its ‘most wanted’ list and declared a reward of ₹10 lakh on him, people familiar with the development said.
Jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi’s brother Anmol Bishnoi, who runs his empire from Canada and the United States and coordinated attacks on NCP leader Baba Siddique on October 12 as well as on actor Salman Khan’s residence in April this year, is now in National Investigation Agency’s crosshairs.
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The federal agency has included Anmol Bishnoi in its ‘most wanted’ list and declared a reward of ₹10 lakh on him, people familiar with the development said.
Earlier, Mumbai police issued a lookout circular against him in connection with the firing outside Khan’s residence on April 14 after he claimed responsibility for the incident on social media. Investigations have revealed that the shooters in Baba Siddique’s murder were also in touch with him over Snapchat.
Siddique was shot dead outside his son Zeeshan’s office building in Bandra East on October 12. He was shot by three armed assailants, and sustained three bullet injuries. Shortly after the incident, a social media post was uploaded by Shubham Lonkar, a suspected member of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, claiming responsibility for the murder.
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“Anmol Bishnoi along with Goldy Brar handles the empire of Lawrence Bishnoi gang from the US and Canada. He along with few others oversees the crime syndicate with active association of the key executioners and operatives at the ground level in India. This includes executing, conspiring with various gang leaders lodged in jails to threaten and terrorize singers, industrialists, political functionaries and sportspersons etc and to extort money from them, even resorting to eliminations and killings, if they fail to pay up,” said an officer, who did not want to be named.
“The syndicate is spread across the states (and union territories) that include Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar and Jharkhand and recruitment, payments to gang members, supply of weapons etc is managed from abroad, mostly by Anmol, Goldy Brar and few other close aides of Lawrence,” the officer added.
Another officer said: “Anmol operates from Canada and keeps on travelling to the US. We have put him on our most wanted list and declared a reward of ₹10 lakh for any information about his whereabouts”.
Also known as ‘Bhanu’, the younger sibling of the jailed gangster was also involved in ordering a hit on singer Sidhu Moose Wala in May 2022. Lawrence Bishnoi has been lodged in Sabarmati prison since August last year.
The Lawrence Bishnoi gang is also closely associated with the pro-Khalistan groups including Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) and agencies feel that Anmol Bishnoi and Goldy Brar run those operations as well.
The NIA has called this entire network the new underworld. In a charge sheet filed in March 2023 into the gangsters’ activities, it said “this nexus of gangsters and PKEs and their links with the music industry, singers, kabaddi players and advocates etc, is working on the lines of the pre-1993 Mumbai blasts era when extensive linkages of the underworld with the business people and the film industry had surfaced.”