Despite planning of days, police botched up the operation to nab Khalistani leader Amritpal Singh who escaped. Jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi gave two video interviews to a private TV channel promising to kill Salman Khan. The Chandigarh Police arrested gangsters who were getting AK-47s to assassinate two noted Punjabi singers.
These three events in Punjab just last week speak of the current law and order situation and paint a worrying scenario on what seems to have become a routine day in the state. The first one year of the Bhagwant Mann government in the state has been marred by the dastardly killing of singer Sidhu Moose Wala in broad daylight, followed by the rise of Amritpal Singh who remained a free man, despite grave provocations and an open espousal of separatism.
When the Punjab Police finally decided to nab him on Saturday afternoon after planning the operation for days and went in with hundreds of cops, Singh managed to make good his escape. This was despite the police now confirming a 16-17 km-long chase by many police vehicles. The Internet was shut down in the state. Singh was available in his village Jallupur Khera for days before that, freely meeting people and journalists, but no effort was made to nab him.
Intelligence inputs show Singh was building a sort of private militia in the drug de-addiction centre he was running in his village for the past six months, storing weapons there and radicalizing these men to use them in his protests like at the Ajnala police station in February. But the police till late did not act against him or raid the de-addiction centre. When News18 visited the centre last week, we were made to delete the videos of the interviews done with a couple of inmates.
LIVE FROM JAIL
Even more intriguing is the case of dreaded gangster Bishnoi who appeared on a private TV channel last week, not once but twice, on a video link to give an interview. Bishnoi is presently lodged in the high-security Bathinda Jail. Punjab police denied that the interview was from this jail and released his picture from jail after the first interview. A couple of days later, he appeared in a second interview wearing the same clothes as in the said picture.
Bishnoi in this interview issued death threats against top Bollywood star Salman Khan and ‘justified’ the killing of singer Sidhu Moose Wala. A first information report (FIR) has now been lodged in Mumbai regarding the threat to Khan and his security has been beefed up.
How Bishnoi has access to a phone and internet in a Punjab jail is a million-dollar question, given the history of his involvement in masterminding the killing of Moose Wala from Delhi’s Tihar jail earlier. The revelations made by Bishnoi have only underlined Moose Wala family’s claim of injustice in the case so far.
PLOTS GALORE
The Moose Wala killing in a brutal gang-war in Punjab in fact continue to fester trouble in the state. This was exposed last week when the Chandigarh Police (not the Punjab Police) nabbed four persons of the Davinder Bambiha gang in Punjab who said they wanted to avenge Moose Wala’s killing. They revealed that they were in the process to get AK-47s from Jammu & Kashmir to kill two prominent Punjabi singers Mankirat Aulakh and Babbu Mann.
The Opposition in Punjab has been asking tough questions to CM Mann on these issues, warning that the law and order situation in Punjab is on the decline and gangs are running amok. The need of the hour is for the Mann government to come down with an iron hand on gangsters in a sensitive border state, so that his promise of ‘Rangla Punjab’ (Prosperous Punjab) comes true.
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