Attack on singers: Police probe role of Sampat Nehra gang

Ishrat S Banwait

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 15

Having arrested five members of the Sampat Nehra gang, the Mohali police are probing their role in the attacks on singers in the recent past.

While singer-director Parmish Verma was shot at in April, another budding singer Navjot Singh was shot dead in Dera Bassi last month. Singer Gippy Grewal also claimed to have recently received an extortion call.

The names of gangsters Sampat Nehra as well as Dilpreet Dhahan are doing the rounds in these cases with no evidence against any of them. However, the police claim to have questioned the five arrested about their involvement in these incidents, which they have denied. However, CIA sources said they would question Sampat about the same.

The Mohali police will seek production warrant of Nehra once his police remand ends in Mohali. The police want to interrogate the six together for better clarity on many cases.

However, Ankit Bhadu, who had fled from Sohana when the other five were arrested, has eluded the Mohali police.

The five arrested members had allegedly hit a cab driver’s motorcycle with their car and taken him to Sohana. They planned to kill him there, but a team of CIA reached there and arrested five of them, while Ankit who was already present there, escaped. Victim Varinder Kumar was attacked as he was in touch with a Hoshiarpur-based girl. The victim was earlier also threatened to stop talking to the girl.

Int’l WhatsApp call — ‘Secure line’ for criminals

Like most other cases, the members of the Sampat Nehra gang were also using international numbers and making WhatsApp calls to each other. The reason for the same is that WhatsApp calls cannot be tracked and international numbers are harder to locate and find the origin of. It is thus virtually a ‘secure line’ for criminals. The threat calls received by artistes were also made using international SIM cards via WhatsApp.