by TAPAS CHAKRABORTY
Lucknow, June 13: A Chambal bandit was gunned down today three months after he had massacred five Dalits, embarrassing chief minister Mayavati.
Police shot dead Deep Chand alias Nadia, 41, and an associate after an encounter in the jungles of Etawah in Chambal early this morning.
“He fought like a wounded tiger before he fell in a fusillade of shots,” a policeman said.
Nadia led a small gang in Etawah, kidnapping middle-class traders for ransom, but hit the headlines on March 13 by killing five members of a Dalit family in Ameenabad village of the district.
The Opposition immediately raised a furore questioning Mayavati’s ability to protect Dalits, who form her main vote bank. The chief minister visited the village on March 14 and Rahul Gandhi, who has been courting Dalits in the state, followed the next day.
Sources said Mayavati told the district police to get Nadia urgently, and in April the force cornered the gang. But although Nadia’s brother-in-law Roop Singh and two other gang members, Udaibhan and Hari Sahai, were killed, Nadia himself escaped.
His luck ran out today when a team of 22 policemen crept up on the gang from all sides in the forests of Takrupara near the Yamuna’s banks.
The police said there were six to seven dacoits in the group but apart from Nadia and an associate, the rest escaped. Sonbeer alias Lokharia, 32, fell with his leader, firing continuously from his improvised rifle till the end. An automatic rifle and several cartridges were found on the dead dacoits.
Additional director-general of police Brij Lal said the gang’s whereabouts were revealed two days ago when the dacoits released a teenage girl whom they had kidnapped from Naiaputia village on May 13. Vinita Jatav had been abducted on her way to a relative’s wedding.
The gang faces about 25 criminal cases, including that of murder and kidnapping. It had abducted and killed a four-year-old boy from Kanpur two years ago.
Etawah superintendent of police S.R. Aditya said Nadia was trying to move into the space left vacant by the killings of the notorious bandits, Nirbhay Gujjar and Mohar Singh.
Just as Nadia met his end after virtually throwing a challenge to Mayavati, Nirbhay was shot dead after declaring publicly that he would surrender only if then chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav agreed to give him political asylum.
“I respect him a lot,” he had said about Mulayam, who happened to be from his own district, Etawah. That would have been embarrassing for the chief minister, whose police sought out the bandit and killed him two months later, on November 8, 2005.
Source: Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment