Arms used by 4 Sidhu Moosewala shooters yet to be recovered
Jupinderjit Singh
Chandigarh, August 24
Nearly 15 months after Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala was shot dead, the police are yet to recover the weapons used by four of the six shooters who were led by Priyavrat Fauji, also called the ‘Bolero car module’ or ‘Fauji module’.
It was expected that the interrogation of one of the alleged main conspirators, Sachin Thapan, extradited from Azerbaijan earlier this month, would lead to the recovery of the weapons. But nothing as such happened. The weapons included .30 bore and .9mm pistols.
Thapan has reportedly revealed the six shooters underwent firing training at a farmhouse in Ayodhya weeks before the murder. It was earlier alleged that the ‘Fauji module’ shooters had, while fleeing the crime spot, hid the weapons at a pre-decided location in Sirsa district. These are learnt to have been later picked up by members of gangster Rohit Godara’s gang, which is active in Haryana and Rajasthan.
The Punjab and Delhi Police had, in separate operations, recovered 15 weapons from the six shooters. An AK-47 and a 9mm pistol recovered from shooter Mannu Kussa matched the bullets found from the singer’s body and the crime spot. But a .30 bore and another 9mm pistol used by others are yet to be recovered. Kussa and another shooter, Roopa, were killed in an encounter with the Punjab Police at Bhakan village in Tarn Taran in July last year.
An investigation by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) found that the weapons were supplied by Pakistan-based arms smugglers through a Dubai-based dealer, Hamid. As per National Investigation Agency officials, the arrest of another arms smuggler, Shahbaz Ansari, in December last year had revealed his alleged links with Pakistani arms smugglers and terrorist network. In July this year, the NIA officials said Ansari met Hamid through Faizi Khan, a Pakistani national working as a hawala operator in Dubai.
Though the NIA has not officially taken up the Moosewala case, it stumbled upon these meetings while investigating an arms supply racket involving Indian gangsters and Pakistan terror agencies. It was found that Hamid had supplied assault rifles and other weapons to gangster Lawrence Bishnoi for the killing of Shubhdeep Singh, alias Sidhu Moosewala. The recovery of the weapons is essential for proving in court the involvement of the shooters in the crime. No police official was willing to speak on record about the non-recovery of the weapons.
