Mumbai (TIP)- A photo of Zeeshan Siddique was found in the phone of one of the men who shot his father, Baba Siddique, last week. The phone recovered from one of the accused arrested during the investigation of the murder case of the NCP leader had his photo, police sources said.
According to the sources, the photo was shared with the accused by their handler through Snapchat. The platform, investigators say, was used by the shooters and conspirators in the case to send messages to each other.
These messages were deleted on instruction from their handler, allegedly belonging to the gang of the notorious gangster Lawrence Bishnoi.
Siddique was shot by three men near his MLA son’s office in Nirmal Nagar in Mumbai’s Bandra area on October 12. The Congress-turned-NCP leader was rushed to nearby Lilavati Hospital where he was declared dead. The police have arrested nine people – including two of the three shooters – in the case so far. Five of them – Nitin Gautam Sapre (32), Sambhaji Kisan Pardhi (44), Pradeep Dattu Thombre (37), Chetan Dilip Pardhi and Ram Fulchand Kanoujia (43) -were arrested yesterday for allegedly providing firearms and logistical support to the shooters. Three accused are still on the run, police said.
Kanoujia, a resident of Panvel in Raigad, told police that the contract to kill Siddique was initially given to him and Sapre, sources said. He quoted a whopping amount of ? 1 crore to take up the contract as, he said, he didn’t want to kill Siddique, the sources added. After Kanaujia and Sapre backed off, the task was given to Dharmraj Kashyap, Gurnail Singh and Shivkumar Gautam, the sources said. Kashyap and Singh were arrested on the day of the crime while Gautam managed to escape.
The accused told police that Shubham Lonkar – who was an alleged conspirator and the handler of the shooters in the case – chose Kashyap and Gautam for the job because he knew the people of Uttar Pradesh would not know about Baba Siddiqui’s stature in Maharashtra and that they would agree to commit the murder even for less money, according to the police sources. When Baba Siddique was shot, he had only one police constable – a part of his security detail – accompanying him who did not retaliate when six rounds were fired at the senior politician. The security personnel has been suspended.
The constable told the investigators that he failed to react at the time of the incident as some “chilli-like substance” had entered his eyes, the sources said.
Source: NDTV