New Delhi: A chase that began in 2024 has finally come to an end after the Punjab Police secured its first-ever deportation of a fugitive from an African country. Gurwinder Singh alias Afridi Toot was finally arrested by a team from the Punjab Police Anti-Gangster Task Force (AGTF).
Named in 35 cases to date, Afridi remained elusive to the Punjab Police for more than two years until Sunday, when he was deported from Ethiopia.
“This is the first-ever deportation of a fugitive secured by the Punjab Police from an African country and heralds a new chapter in our fight against organised crime. The operation marks the successful culmination of Operation Shahid — a ten-month-long intelligence-led international manhunt involving sustained surveillance, strategic intelligence gathering and close coordination with national and international agencies,” Punjab DGP Gaura Yadav said during a press conference Sunday.
Yadav said that the entire operation was launched by the state in close coordination with the Overseas Fugitive Tracking and Extradition Cell (OFTEC) established within the police’s Counter Intelligence wing. He further said that IG Ashish Choudhary, who heads the OFTEC unit, was coordinating with central and international agencies, and that Afridi was taken into custody at the airport by an AGTF team led by SP Bikramjit Brar.
Chief of AGTF, Pramod Ban said that Afridi had flown out of India via Mumbai in March last year using a fraudulently acquired passport in the name of a Gorakhpur resident.
“Punjab Police had issued a Red Corner Notice against accused Gurwinder Afridi, and inputs regarding his fake passport and whereabouts were shared with central agencies at different intervals. In addition, seven INTERPOL references were also issued,” Ban said.
The courtroom escape: What happened two years ago
Afridi first came under the scanner of the Tarn Taran Police in 2024 in connection with the desecration of a church in the district in August 2022. He and three associates had allegedly decapitated statues of Lord Jesus Christ and Mother Mary and set a parked Bolero on the church premises on fire.
One of those associates had been arrested and revealed all the names, including Afridi’s, to the police, prompting a manhunt.
A local court Judge received his plea of surrender and summoned the concerned Station House Officer (SHO) and the investigating officer (IO) to appear in court for further proceedings. There was an instruction for Afridi too — to sit in front of the Court on the chairs placed for the litigants until the arrival of the IO.
But Afridi had a change of mind and fled the courtroom before the officers could turn up. In the coming days, he once again shocked the local police in October 2024 when he shot dead an AAP activist, Rajwinder Singh, at Talwandi Mohar Singh village, shortly after successful results in the Panchayat elections.
Also Read: ASI shot dead in Tarn Taran; 5th Punjab cop killed this year in border districts
Notoriety built on village & local rivalries
Having come to the notice of the local police in the church desecration case, Afridi also came in contact with the handlers of the foreign-based gangsters such as Prabhdeep Singh alias Prabh Dasuwal and Balwinder Singh alias Doni Bal, who have been running a local gang which was earlier run by gangster Gopi Ghanshampuria in the Majha region of Punjab, spanning border districts of Pathankot, Gurdaspur, Amritsar, and Tarn Taran.
In the same region, Canada-based Lakhvinder Singh alias Landa also ran its criminal gang comprising local youth, lured on the pretext of heavy money and foreign settlement avenues.
It was part of the same inter-gang rivalry that led to the killing of Punjab Police ASI Iqbal Singh, metres away from his residence in the Naushera Pannuan village of Tarn Taran last month. Exactly a month earlier, on 11 September, his nephew Ajmeet Singh was killed in a similar manner.
ThePrint earlier reported how inter-gang rivalry between the ones led by Landa also includes his own son, Komalpreet Singh Pannu and the other led by Doni Bal and Dassuwal, also comprising Afridi, led to the killing of both Iqbal and his nephew Ajmeet.
“Afridi has accepted to have provided a vehicle to the shooters used in the offence of ASI Iqbal’s killing,” a Punjab Police officer privy to the probe told ThePrint, requesting anonymity.
“He was also the nodal point who brought the shooter Gurlal for the conspiracy behind the killing of Ajmeet in September this year,” he further said.
Before the twin killings in Naushera Pannuan in September-October, Afridi had also facilitated the Dassuwal-Bal gang in January this year, when he had allegedly arranged hideouts for the two shooters, who had pumped bullets from point-blank range into the body of Jarmal Singh in Amritsar. A local political worker linked to the ruling party, Singh was sarpanch of Valtoha village in Tarn Taran district and was attending a wedding at a venue in Amritsar.
The chilling footage of the killing from the venue had gone viral on social media, sparking outrage over the ease and pace with which the two shooters, later identified as Sukhraj Singh alias Gunga and Karamjit Singh, had killed him in the presence of hundreds of people. “Afridi had provided shelter to the two shooters and will be implicated in this case too,” the officer said.
Similarly, Afridi had also got one former sarpanch of his village killed for harbouring a grudge over not falling in line with his instructions. According to police records, Afridi had warned the former sarpanch of his village, Gurmail Singh, not to provide equipment to one Kulwant Kaur for farming at the disputed land with him.
Afridi then ordered a hit, and Gurmail Singh was shot dead by three Royal Enfield-borne assailants, who stopped his tractor and fired indiscriminately at him, reiterating the point that Afridi had sent them to teach Gurmail Singh a lesson.
AGTF Chief Ban said that Afridi was found to be involved in a number of heinous and high-profile cases, such as the killing of AAP sarpanch Rajwinder in October 2024, along with the murder of 12-year-old boy Gursewak Singh in March 2025. He was also implicated in the three chilling cases of murders of Vicky Chugh in March 2025, Jaswant Singh in May 2025 and the murder of Congress Block President Gurmel Singh in September 2025.
From Punjab to Africa
Gursewak Singh had gone to play a football match in a tournament in the Khabbe Rajputan in Amritsar district in March last year, when bike-borne assailants opened fire during the prize distribution of the tournament. Two unknown persons opened fire at a local Army man, Gurpreet Singh alias Janu. While a bullet hit Gurpreet, leaving him injured, another round of firing by shooters hit Gursewak Singh, leaving him dead.
However, before the police could establish his role in the case, Afridi was ahead of the game and had already secured a passport using the fake credentials of a Gorakhpur-based man named Vijendra Singh. Using the same passport, issued from Lucknow, he flew from Mumbai on 31 March last year and went to the United Arab Emirates.
According to the police officials, Afridi first tried to hide himself in the UAE but later attempted to flee to Mexico via Istanbul on another fraudulently acquired passport in the UAE. However, he was deported back to the UAE. Subsequently, he moved to Kenya in April 2026, before travelling onwards to Angola in June 2026. He finally ran out of luck when he was detained by Ethiopian authorities on the basis of an Interpol notice issued by Indian agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
According to the police officers privy to his crime trajectory, Afridi has directly made more than 100 extortion calls to businesspersons and influential people in the state of Punjab. “His name has also cropped up in the probe of more than two dozen cases of extortion-related firing,” another police officer said.
His arrest alone has led to the identification of around a dozen shooters in the Majha region, causing havoc in the border districts of Punjab. “His arrest is a huge breakthrough and comes as a major hit to the gang run by Dassuwal and Bal,” the second officer said. “From him, a large cache of weapons including AK-47, Zigana and Glock pistols is set to be recovered, and operations have been launched for the same,” the officer said.
(Edited by Anupama Yadav)