Chandigarh: Ankit, an 18-year-old Class 8 student from Sonipat who has been arrested in connection with last week’s firing on Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff, has emerged as the latest link between the attack, which took place in Mumbai, and Haryana.
Of the 10 accused arrested so far, seven are from Haryana: all with a connection to Sonipat district. Two others worked in the state. Anil Pandit, the gangster accused of planning the attack from abroad, has roots in Panipat.
As they investigate the case, police have uncovered what they describe as an elaborate conspiracy where every role in the attack—from arranging weapons and conducting reconnaissance to scouting escape routes and aiding the shooters in the aftermath—was carefully assigned to different people: from a nondescript teenager to a history-sheeter.
A resident of Baroda village in Gohana subdivision, Ankit—accused of conducting the recce—was taken away by Mumbai Police Wednesday evening.
The arrests
Police sources say Ankit is one of the young recruits of the gang that orchestrated the attack. They describe him as “small, local and easy to use”, adding that he could blend into the crowd. Police say Ankit, also known as Rajesh, stayed in Mumbai for 20 days while the plot was being put together.
The trail from Ankit goes up to Kunal, 21, a Sonipat resident who was arrested Tuesday from PGI Rohtak while being treated for a road-rage injury.
Police describe Kunal as the main pawn in the plot. A history-sheeter, he already had two cases registered against him—one for assault, wrongful restraint and criminal intimidation, and the other related to firing on a money exchanger’s office in Panipat and an extortion attempt —when he allegedly joined the plan.
It was while he was in jail for the second case that Kunal came in contact with fellow inmate Sumit: now an accused in the Tiger Shroff case, Sumit, 19, was allegedly already in touch with Anil Pandit when he met Kunal.
When the Tiger Shroff conspiracy began taking shape, Kunal was allegedly assigned the task of taking the weapons to Mumbai, with police saying he was paid Rs 80,000 for the task by Pandit.
To get the weapons to Kunal, a dead letter box—or a dead drop—was arranged.
A dead letter box is a covert method to pass along things in secret—it’s a fixed spot where one person leaves a package and another picks it up later. The two never meet. There is no phone call, and no face to remember. If the police catch one, he cannot name the other.
No novelty in the region, the dead letter box—used in the 2022 Mohali rocket-propelled grenade attack, among other cases in Punjab—does mark a shift in trend in the Tiger Shroff case, a police source said. It is perhaps the first known instance of a local gang, not a militant module, using this route.
Kunal was allegedly sent the location of the dead drop—a hideout in Amritsar—over an encrypted app. Once there, police sources say, he found a pistol and 20 cartridges.
Kunal now had the weapon, but no way to move it, so he allegedly turned to his girlfriend Radha and her friend Babita, who, police sources say, were offered Rs 15,000–Rs 20,000 to carry the weapons to Mumbai.
On 15 October, three days before the attack, both women arrived at a Delhi railway station to board a train for Mumbai—the pistol allegedly stashed in Radha’s bag. They reached Mumbai on 17 October and checked into a hotel near Dadar railway station. A police source said a local boy came to the hotel the same day and collected the pistol and cartridges from Radha.
The firing on Tiger Shroff took place the next day. The shooters have since been identified as Ritik, Rihan and Phool Singh, who fled Mumbai by train but were caught en route in Kota, Rajasthan. Delhi Police later picked up Radha and Babita at a Delhi railway station Tuesday, the same day Kunal was arrested from hospital and Sumit from Sonipat.
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Base Haryana
The accused fall into three groups, and Haryana runs through each of them. Among the three accused of firing, Phool Singh, 18, belongs to Baroda village in Sonipat. Rehan, alias Sukka, also 18, lives in Sonipat as well. The third, Ritik Kumar, alias Roshan, 22, is from Begusarai in Bihar, and drove a bike taxi in Mumbai.
Four people are accused of getting the weapons to the shooters. Besides Kunal, there is Sumit, who is originally from Rohtak but lived at Kharkhauda in Sonipat. Among the other two, Radha Verma, 29, is from Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh, and Babita, 24, from Azamgarh in the same state. Both women are said to have worked at a packaging factory in Sonipat.
The third group is accused of recce and conspiracy. Along with Ankit, it includes Nitin, a resident of Rohna village in Sonipat, who is accused of bringing the weapons from Amritsar. The others accused are Sameer, a Sonipat resident and friend of a man named Jatin, another local accused who allegedly worked in coordination with the shooters.
Police sources say the gang involved has been using Haryana as a base to recruit young men and a staging post for weapons.
Addressing a press conference on Police Commemoration Day Wednesday, Haryana Director General of Police Ajay Singhal said Haryana Police had assisted Mumbai Police in arresting the accused in the state. He said the force had provided all the inputs required.
Edited by Sunanda Ranjan
Also Read: Probe in attack on Tiger Shroff widens. 2 women nabbed from Delhi station, 2 men from Sonipat