Three years after Nangal Ambian killing, 2 arrested

Almost three years ago, four shooters walked into a kabaddi match at Mallian Khurd village in Jalandhar and shot international kabaddi player Sandeep Nangal Ambian multiple times from point-blank range.

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The player, who had captained both India and the United Kingdom besides representing various clubs in foreign countries, died from the very first bullet fired at him. It hit in the middle of his forehead.

The shooters — Harjit Singh, alias Harry Maur, Ravinder Singh, Puneet Lakhanpal, alias Sharma, and Narinder Kumar Lalli — left the spot in a white car without being challenged.

Though they were identified within a week of the incident when the Delhi and Punjab Police arrested some of the main conspirators belonging to the Kaushal Chaudhry / Lucky Patial gang and named their international handlers, it still took close to three years for the cops to nab all four shooters.

The counter intelligence unit of the Punjab Police nabbed six persons in an operation at Amritsar's Jandiala. These included Puneet and Lalli.

Harry Maur and Ravinder Singh were arrested by the Delhi Special Cell in September 2023, almost 18 months after the crime.

The Punjab Police then recovered the car used in the murder and the weapons in February 2024, almost two years after the murder.

And now, the two remaining shooters have been caught. The arrest is significant as these killers have been roaming free for long, carrying out murders and extorting money at will.

This, despite the fact, that the police of Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi were trying to find them. And also, despite a quarrel between the shooters shortly after they killed Ambian, one of them, Maur, shot Puneet in his leg, and he still walks with a limp.

Ambian’s murder took place on March 14, 2022, in the transition week of the change of power in Punjab. The Aam Aadmi Party had dislodged the Congress by winning 92 of the 117 seats in the Assembly poll.

The murder shook the state and also brought to light the involvement of gangsters in organising kabaddi matches.

The police claimed, immediately after the murder, that it was an outcome of a gang war on controlling the money-making kabaddi leagues with a network spread in Canada, UK, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Italy. Punjab was the main operation ground.

Ambian is said to have been running a league supported by gangster Jaggu Bhagwanpuriya while the Bambiha gang wanted him to work for their leagues.

The Punjab Police, soon after the murder, booked Snover Dhillon, a radio journalist in Brampton, Canada, and Surjit Singh Chatha of England, who ran his own kabaddi federation.

The police also nominated gangster Sukhwinder Singh, alias Sukha Duneke, and Jagjit Singh, alias Gandhi, of Malaysia, as conspirators.

Chatha was the only one arrested last year by the Jalandhar police, while Sukha Duneke was killed by rival gangsters in Canada on September 20, 2023.

The police had claimed that Snover Dhillon ran the “National Kabaddi Federation of Ontario,” but major players were associated with the “Major League Kabaddi” managed by Sandeep Ambian. Dhillon had tried to lure Ambian with offers of large money and later threatened him also, but Ambian refused to join him.

Police sources said though it took long to catch the two absconding shooters, the significant thing was that they have been nabbed at a crucial time when they had assembled in Punjab to "carry out some target killings at the behest of their foreign-based handlers".

“We are questioning them to know where they hid and how they carried out their operations. We have prevented a feared crime spree in the region with their arrests,” said a senior police official involved in their arrest.