How Bishnoi-Brar gang leaders planned hit jobs with henchmen over Telegram, Signal

Brar, a designated terrorist, is believed to be in Canada, while his partner Bishnoi is serving time at Sabarmati jail in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

A police officer said the arrested men were planning revenge killings on members of the rival Tillu Tajpuria gang in Delhi and Rajasthan, adding they were in touch with Brar and Bishnoi. A case in this regard was registered at Special Cell on April 24.

A senior officer told The Indian Express that the operation was planned after police received a tip-off that one of the arrested men, Manjeet, was “in constant touch with Brar through Telegram and Signal, and they were planning something big in Delhi”.

The arrests

The first arrests, police said, was made in New Delhi on April 27. Jaspreet Singh alias Rahul, 25, was arrested near Shastri Park Pusta while Dharmendra alias Kartik was nabbed near Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station. On the same day, another team arrested 22-year-old Abhay Soni alias Kartik alias Kabir in Jaipur. Simultaneously, teams nabbed Sachin Kumar alias Rahul, 26, from Lucknow along with a minor. In another raid, on April 27, 20-year-old Santosh alias Sultan Baba was arrested in Ratlam, MP.

On April 30, Manjeet was arrested in Sonipat, Haryana. In Punjab, Gurpal Singh, 26, and Manjeet Singh Guri, 22, of Mohali were also arrested the same day. The last arrest was made during a raid in Vaishali, Bihar, where Santosh Kumar, 27, was arrested on May 2. Pistols with live cartridges were recovered in almost all the arrests, police said.

The police officer quoted above said the arrested persons were planning revenge killings on the Tillu gang. “Brar would direct them,” the officer said, adding their plans came to light after police intercepted their chats. “During questioning, they revealed they were going to be provided with the name of the person to be killed a day before… it was all going to happen within a few weeks.”

According to a statement by the Special Cell on Wednesday, all the arrested gang members were “connected with each other through Facebook, Instagram, and other encrypted chat platforms”.

A high-level team of Special Cell led by ACP Lalit Mohan Negi and ACP Hridya Bhushan along with Inspectors Shiv Kumar and Satish Rana “started surveillance on the gang members” before finally cracking this network.

DCP (Special Cell) Pratiksha Godara, who supervised the operation, told The Indian Express: “Members of this criminal gang have been involved in heinous offences in Delhi and other states.”

A senior police officer said that such gang members do not know each other and are simply asked to go to a location and execute the task. “Once they commit a crime, they exchange numbers and in this case too, all the accused had one common link – conversations with Brar, who was, in turn, in touch with Bishnoi inside jail,” he said.

The gang war: How it started

Lawrence Bishnoi, who is currently lodged in Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Jail, met his now-close-associate Goldy Brar at the Panjab University in 2011. Thereafter, the duo got involved in university politics and started engaging in crime on the university campus.

Currently, Bishnoi is said to have more than 700 sharpshooters at his command, across the country but mostly concentrated in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. All of them are involved in several attempt to murder, murder, extortion, assault, and robbery cases. Bishnoi had joined hands with the gang of Jitendra Gogi and also created an alliance with the Kala Jathedi syndicate.

Their rival gang, the Tajpuria gang, had forged an alliance with Neeraj Bawana, Naveen Bali, Kaushal and Bambiha. The rivarly of Gogi and Sunil alias Tillu Tajpuria dates back to 2012; till 2021, several killings of associates of both of them took place. In September 2021, Gogi was killed inside Rohini Court by two men employed by Tajpuria who posed as lawyers. In May 2023, Tajpuria was stabbed to death in prison by four men associated with the Gogi gang.