Salem aide who managed his money, ran extortion business in NCR held

Noida: The Noida unit of the Special Task Force (STF) arrested a close aide of 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Abu Salem and his sharpshooter Khan Mubarak from the Sector 20 police station area on Wednesday night.
The accused, 38-year-old Gajendra Singh, is a property dealer and an investor of Salem’s money in Delhi-NCR, police said. He has been sent to judicial custody.
Raj Kumar Mishra, additional superintendent of police, STF, said that they had received information about Singh’s operations in Noida. “We were tipped off that he would be visiting his home in Sector 20 D block, following which a raid was conducted around 9.30pm and the arrest was made,” he said.
Mishra said police had recovered a pistol from the house of Singh’s partner in the property dealing business, Sanjay Sharma, in Surajpur. An FIR has been filed against him under sections of the Arms Act.
Since 2014, Singh had been running an extortion racket for Salem and using his property business to mask his criminal activities, Mishra said. “He would get people to buy property through him and after taking payment, he would threaten them by using the names of Abu Salem and Khan Mubarak,” he said.
In 2014, Mishra said, Gajendra Singh took Rs 1.8 crore from a Delhi-based businessman, Mukesh Bhargav, on the pretext of selling a property. When he was asked to return the money, Singh plotted an attack on the businessman and arranged for shooters to fire at him in Sector 18. The businessman, who was in his car, escaped. The attack took place in May.
Earlier that year, police said, Mubarak had transferred Rs 10 lakh to Singh’s account, with which the latter bought a Fortuner car in Kanpur.
“Gajendra Singh met Abu Salem and Zafar Supari (Khan Mubarak’s brother) in 2014 through Salem’s brother Abu Jaish in a Mumbai court. He was asked to join Salem in his operations in NCR and was given a personal shooter, Harish Khan. The two men made a lot of money between 2014 and 2017 by extorting people using Salem’s name,” Mishra said. Police does not know the whereabouts of Harish Khan.
In 2017, Singh had allegedly sheltered Khan Mubarak in his Noida home right before the latter was arrested in Mirzapur district by the STF.
Police said they had recovered the details of various bank accounts that had been made with fake Aadhaar and PAN cards through which Singh had exchanged money with gangsters.
During interrogation, they said Singh confessed to extorting Rs 52 lakh from a Sector 20 resident, Vineet Chauhan. The STF showed three cases related cheating, criminal intimidation and attempt to murder, all lodged at the Sector 20 police station in 2017 and 2018, at the time of producing him in court.
Singh also told police that he is a distant relative of gangsters Sundar Bhati, who is from western UP, and Azad Bansal of Ghaziabad.