New Delhi: When Bansi appeared in court here this week in yet another drugs case, he had no idea his past was about to catch up with him. His long-held alias, Ajay Lamba, had finally unraveled, revealing his true identity and bringing to an end his 25-year run from justice in multiple murder cases.
The man who allegedly masterminded the killings of several taxi drivers between 1999 and 2001 in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand was finally nabbed by Delhi Police’s crime branch investigators led by inspectors Rakesh Kumar and Anuj Kumar after his hearing in the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act (NDPS) case was over.
He was arrested after he left the Patiala House Court, as the police was able to establish his identity. Bansi was wanted in four murders in Delhi, and Uttarakhand’s Haldwani, Almora and Champawat. He was never arrested in these cases before.
According to investigators, the now 49-year-old Ajay Lamba alias Bansi headed a gang that would allegedly book taxis from stands, give the driver sedative-laced edibles and water, then strangle them with bare hands, before throwing the bodies off mountains and into drains. The taxis were then sold in Nepal.
“This is what has been reported, there are more people this gang has killed but that couldn’t be tracked. Some taxi drivers might have been reported missing and the cases were reported as missing since nobody was found and the taxis also couldn’t be located,” said a police officer.
The gang included brothers Dhiraj and Dhirendra Tomar, and another person named Dilip Negi. While Tomar and Negi were arrested, convicted and awarded life imprisonment in 2007 in a murder case in Delhi.
Tomar jumped a parole and managed to stay out of jail for 15 years until the Delhi Police caught him in May, putting him back behind bars. Dhiraj continues to evade the law. He was acquitted in three murder cases due to lack of evidence.
Also Read: Gangs of New Delhi – featuring young guns, social media swag, & finance
The gang-up in Bareilly
The modus operandi the gang chose worked perfectly in a world where cab aggregator services did not exist. In 2001, for example, they allegedly killed a driver after hiring him from a taxi stand in Jaipur. A murder case was lodged at Delhi’s Ashok Nagar police station.
“At that time, there weren’t any Ola and Uber services and so all taxis were to be booked at local stands. This gang would wait at different taxi stands and then prey on the drivers. They had booked the taxi from Jaipur for Anand Vihar, Delhi,” the officer quoted above said.
He said they killed the driver and when they were disposing of the body some people saw them. They also thought they had killed a co-passenger. “The co-passenger survived and identified the accused. Dhirender Tomar and Dilip Negi were arrested but the other two managed to flee,” the officer added.
After skipping his one-month parole in 2010, Tomar changed his name to ‘Rajan Singh’ and got new identity cards made under this new identity. Sources said Tomar started working as a driver with his brother-in-law in Bareilly, telling them he served his sentence.
But his luck ran out in May when he was finally nabbed. It was during Tomar’s questioning after his re-arrest that investigators could confirm Ajay Lamba was indeed Bansi, who was wanted in the four murder cases and, at one point in 1995, was listed as a ‘Bad Character’ in the Vikas Puri police station.
‘Bad Characters’ is a term used to refer to individuals who have been arrested in several cases in the past and are added to the “BC list” by the police in order to keep track of them.
According to investigators, Bansi dropped out of class six and got involved in the world of crime during his early teen years. He then lived in the Om Vihar near Qutub Nagar in Delhi.
At least seven cases of theft, robbery and those under the Arms Act were registered against him and he was arrested by the local police. Once he came out in 1996, he changed his identity to Ajay Lamba, shifted to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh and started selling clothes on a cart near the railway station there.
It was here that the three others, all from Bareilly, met each other and him. The four became friends between 1996 and 1999. And thus was born a gang that went on a killing spree, targeting unsuspecting taxi drivers in the state, Delhi, Uttarakhand and beyond, and selling their vehicles in Nepal.
The Delhi Police, meanwhile, had no idea that Bansi had changed his name and managed to evade police for 25 years in the murder cases.
“Bansi was the eldest among them all. He had come up with the idea of killing the taxi drivers and then selling off their vehicles in Nepal,” another police officer said.
They continued there till March 2001 when Tomar and Negi were arrested in the Jaipur driver’s murder case lodged in Delhi. Once Bansi and Dhiraj realised the lid had blown off and their arrest was imminent, they absconded. In 2008, Bansi moved to Nepal and got married there.
Identifying Bansi
He returned to India in 2018 and started living in Dehradun with his family. Sources said during his interrogation, the 49-year-old revealed he was involved in car theft in Nepal too, and sold the vehicles stolen there in Manipur and other parts of Northeast India.
Once in Dehradun, he turned to another crime—drug smuggling.
“He started smuggling cannabis from Odisha and sold it to his contacts in Uttam Nagar (in Delhi). He was arrested in 2021 in Delhi’s Sagarpur police station area,” the first officer quoted above said.
But the police did not know at that time this was the man wanted in four murder cases as he had assumed a new identity, and, as the officer said, police did not have the dots they could join.
“The murder cases were very old and it wasn’t like there were online records at that time like in the present time. He got bail in this case and continued smuggling drugs,” the officer said.
Bansi was arrested again, this time in a drugs case in Odisha in 2024. He remained in jail in that case till January. It wasn’t known even at this point that he is the same wanted accused.
“For the murders, investigators knew that the gang operated under one Ajay Lamba, based on the interrogation of the other accused. However, it wasn’t known that he is the same Bansi, listed as the Bad Character. So, in the Vikash Puri police records, he was Bansi and in the Ashok Nagar police records he was named as Ajay Lamba,” the officer explained.
His status in the murder cases remained unknown to the courts and the police.
However, after Tomar’s interrogation by the Crime Branch, investigators started tracing Lamba. The jail authorities in Odisha told them he was released from prison in January.
“Investigation revealed that his wife would visit him in the prison. So investigators recceed his Dehradun address. Here it was learnt that he lives in Odisha with his son. The team found out that he hadn’t appeared for his last hearing date in the Delhi drugs case in April and his lawyer had requested that he be allowed to appear through video conferencing. The court issued a warning and that he has to be present at the next hearing date in July,” the officer said.
The hearing was 5 July. Lamba came to Delhi for the hearing and was finally nabbed by the crime branch.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
Also Read: Who was gangster Gogi? ‘Face of college violence in Delhi, saw himself as a warlord’ say cops