Gurugram: Among the four alleged sharpshooters of the Deepak Nandal gang killed in a police encounter in Gurugram’s Sushant Lok Thursday night were two 17-year-olds, one of whom was a national-level athlete. Two of them also had no criminal record. For the police, it is the indication of a pattern that gangsters operating from outside India are increasingly relying on: recruiting young boys barely out of their teens, who wouldn’t easily surface on the police’s radar.
According to Gurugram Police, the four had been sent to a real estate businessman’s house to extort money. Three of them—Ankit, Nitin and Aryan—hailed from Bhalaut village in Rohtak. Ankit was 19. The other two were 17. Police records show that Nitin was accused in an attempt-to-murder case and another linked to illegal arms possession. Ankit and Aryan had no prior record.
The fourth, Sandeep alias ‘Deepa’, who was in his late 20s, was from Samain village in Fatehabad. He was accused in 14 cases, including those under the Arms Act and Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.
‘He deserved a chance’
Aryan was a Class 12 student. Pradeep Fogaat, Aryan’s father, said that his 17-year-old son was a national-level javelin thrower, who had been training for two years and was already throwing 55-60 metres in practice, having won a gold at an athletics meet in Rajasthan in 2025.
Two days before the encounter, Aryan had left home saying that his motorcycle needed to be repaired and had gone to the village bus stand. He didn’t have a phone of his own. The family later learnt he had gone with Nitin. Pradeep even tried contacting his son on Nitin’s phone, but it was switched off.
The village sarpanch informed the family about the encounter only Friday morning, after the local police station reached out.
“My son was naive. He deserved one chance. The bullet could have hit his leg, it didn’t have to hit his chest,” Pradeep told ThePrint. He said he had never heard the name Deepak Nandal before it appeared in news reports linking his son to the gangster.
“Action should be taken against these gangsters who lure children, not against these innocent kids,” he said.
Meanwhile, Nitin’s father Sanjay, a tourist-taxi driver, said that Nitin had left home with Aryan two days before on a motorcycle, after which his phone was switched off. When the family went to file a missing person’s report, Sanjay said, the police responded callously: “Whom do we go looking for?”
The father said the family did not know any Deepak Nandal, or “bhau”. “Police should catch the big gangsters, not children like these.”
‘He said he was going for Kanwar’
Ankit had failed Class 8 and did not have a steady job, and would occasionally work as a daily-wage labourer. His father, a contract labourer at an Amul plant—with three other sons and a wife to support—said Ankit had left home two days before, saying that he was going to Haridwar to bring a Kanwar, but had not revealed who he was travelling with. A kanwar is an arched bamboo pole used by Shiva devotees during the annual Kanwar Yatra to carry holy water.
“We had no idea about his friends or associates,” Anil said. Ankit had never engaged in criminal activities, he said, and the family learnt of the encounter only when a policeman and the village chowkidar arrived at their door Friday morning.
A pattern
A police officer in Gurugram told ThePrint that the pattern of gangsters recruiting young boys to do their bidding has been observed in some of the country’s highest-profile contract killings in recent years.
In the May 2022 murder of Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala, one of the shooters who had fired from close range was barely 18-19 years old, with no prior police record. He was found to be recruited over social media by gangsters Lawrence Bishnoi and Goldy Brar and sent directly on a major assignment because he did not feature on any watch list.
In the October 2024 killing of Maharashtra NCP leader Baba Siddique in Mumbai, the shooters hired from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana were also young and from ordinary backgrounds, with no criminal antecedents in their home states, making identification difficult for Mumbai police in the crucial early hours.
Even the firing on Haryanvi singer Rahul Fazilpuria in Gurugram last year followed the same template, with most of those arrested aged 18-19 and carrying clean records.
Police sources say gangsters typically start such recruits on “low-risk” tasks, firing in the air outside a businessman’s house, conducting recce, or delivering an extortion note, before moving them to bigger assignments, keeping the syndicate’s more experienced operators away from police attention.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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