Three more held in Rockland shooting case; were in city to attend birthday

Two weeks after the police arrested three men for allegedly shooting at a 35-year-old former gangster near Manesar’s Rockland Hospital, the Sector 39 crime branch, on Thursday, arrested three more suspects from Khatola village. The police said they had received a tip-off that the suspects had come to the village to attend the birthday party of one of the suspects’ son.

The three were identified as Kushalpal alias Raghav (39) from Khatola village, Rinku alias Bharamjeet (27) from Baskushla village and Veerindra alias Veeru (31) from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh.

According to the police, at least 18 cases, including murder, attempt to murder and robbery, were registered against Kushalpal, who operated a gang for more than two decades, but had kept a low profile over the last decade.

Sector 39 crime branch in-charge Varun Dahiya said, “When we were informed that they would come to the village, we laid a trap and nabbed them. They were arrested before they could attend the party.”

The police confiscated one Scorpio SUV, two countrymade pistols and three live rounds of ammunition from them. The men were produced in a district court on Friday and remanded to police custody for three days. On Monday, they were sent to judicial custody by the district court.

On May 2, the police had arrested three other suspects in the case, identified as Deepak, 28, and Munender, 27, and Yogendra, 32. According to the police, the three suspects, during interrogation, had said that they had been planning to exact revenge on Ved Yadav since he got bail in 2016. Yadav had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 2011 for murdering Manoj, Yogendra’s older brother and Kushalpal’s cousin. One suspect was held in April in the case, taking the total number of arrests to seven.

First Published: May 14, 2019 03:44 IST