Chandigarh’ Sector 26 bar owner gets security post murder bid

Days after Chandigarh Police’s operation cell arrested three shooters who were allegedly planning to eliminate the owner of a lounge bar in Sector 26, UT police have now given him protection.

The shooters were allegedly operating on the directions of gangster Gurjant Singh, alias Janta, the brother of Jaspreet Singh Jassi, who, along with gangster Jaipal Singh Bhullar, was killed in an encounter in Kolkata.

According to the police, Gurjant, who resides in Australia, runs his brother’s gang.

The security move came following an attack on a Mohali trader Rohit Gupta, who is a Dhanas resident. Gupta was shot in the leg by three masked men outside his toy shop in Jhampur, Mohali. Rohit had alerted the police about the threats he was receiving, nearly a month before the attack, but the police had still not provided him any protection.

A special committee of the UT police has now deputed two gunmen with the Sector 26 bar owner and a personal security officer (PSO) with Rohit on Monday.

Men behind attack on lounge bar owner had 6 pistols

Meanwhile, police investigation in the attempt-to-murder case of the Sector 26 bar owner revealed that the shooters came with six pistols, of which three were of .32 bore and the other three were of .30 bore.

Out of the six people involved, three, including Shamsher Singh, 25, of Dakha, Ludhiana, and Vikram, 21, of Sonepat in Haryana and Ranbir Singh, 20, alias Kaka of Dhanola, Barnala, in Punjab, were nabbed by the operation cell last month.

“Vikram, who was in direct touch with Gurjant, had collected four pistols from Noida and two from Mohali-Kharar road. Vikram didn’t know the person who left the weapons at the spot from where they were picked. He was asked to collect both the bags from Mohali and Noida. Vikram who was earlier booked in a murder and Arms Act case in Gohana, Haryana, in April 2023, where he had pumped 18 shots into the victim’s head. Shamsher was booked in two assault cases in Mullanpur, Dakha, Ludhiana,” an officer privy to the matter said.

The officer added that the other three men who managed to evade police arrest didn’t make any contact with each other after the murder bid. They took different routes while escaping and even disposed of their phones.

Accused carried out recce on May 19

Sources claimed there were a total of six people involved behind the conspiracy to eliminate their target. Four persons were captured on CCTV cameras carrying out a recce in Sector 26 on May 19 around 9.17 pm. “There was a lot of police presence in the area as we received a tip-off that the gang members would try to kill their target. They aborted the attack then,” a senior police officer said. According to sources, the accused planned to kill their target after the latter refused to pay the extortion money to their handler.

Sources added that the four shooters, who reached outside the bar on May 26 on two bikes, were waiting for their target to come there, but following a tip-off, police teams nabbed two of them, while the other two managed to flee. Police later arrested the third accused on their disclosure.