Nabha jailbreak key man held

Aman Sood

Tribune News Service

Patiala, September 19

In a major breakthrough, the CIA wing of the Punjab Police has arrested gangster Gurjeet Ladda, a key accused in the Nabha jailbreak case, near Rajpura following inputs from the Organised Crime Control Unit.

Besides masterminding the jailbreak, Ladda is involved in several cases of kidnapping and over a dozen double murder cases. He is a key suspect in the daylight murder of two rival gangsters in Gurdaspur on April 20.

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On Monday night, Crime Investigating Agency’s Rajpura incharge Bikramjit Brar arrested Ladda as he tried to mow down policemen with his Pajero car bearing a fake registration number.

Several fake documents, including a passport and IDs, were recovered from the accused. Ladda had used the fake passport to travel to Dubai along with his wife and daughter. “He was now planning to leave for the US,” said Patiala SSP S Bhupathi.

This is the 26th arrest in the Nabha jailbreak case in which four gangsters and two terrorists had escaped on November 27, 2016. During the attack, Ladda in police uniform had fired indiscriminately at the jail guard to help the dreaded criminals escape, said Brar.

“He along with arrested gangster Palwinder Pinda was the key conspirator. It was his brainchild to use police uniforms to gain entry into the jail complex,” said Brar, adding that Ladda was also instrumental in ensuring that Majha and Doaba gangsters worked together.

He is also believed to be behind the kidnapping of a doctor of a drug de-addiction centre in Amritsar. The doctor was later released after Rs 1.25 crore was paid in ransom.

In May 2017, Dr Munish Kumar, another Amritsar doctor, was kidnapped and released after the family paid Rs 7.5 lakh against the ransom demand of Rs 1 crore.

He had further extorted Rs 50 lakh from another victim, besides Rs 90 lakh from Harjinder Bajaj, a Chandigarh financier, in 2016.

“Ladda was the mastermind of the double murder case in which he along with Vicky Gounder shot rival gangsters Sukhchain Singh of Sangalpura area of Gurdaspur and Harpreet Singh, alias Subedar Bhatti, of Mustafabad village. Two others, Happy and Prince, were grievously injured,” said SSP Bhupathi.