The shocking attack on a father-son duo by over a dozen armed people inside the Intensive Care Unit of a multi-specialty hospital in Gurgaon has once again revived the frightening memories of the shootouts between criminal gangs in the Millennium City a few years ago.
It was as recently as 2006 when the areas such as Ghata, Badshapur and other villages on the outskirts of Gurgaon witnessed frequent shootouts between criminal gangs to establish their control in the area. According to police sources, the memories of the first gang war in Gurgaon date back to 1996 when the gangs of Bunty alias Fauji, a resident of Teekli village, and Rajje battled it out in Jharsa and the latter was killed in the fierce exchange of fire.
Yet another dreaded gang called “D Company” was led by Badshapur-resident Dilip, a dismissed Delhi Police constable. The gang notorious for threatening and extorting money from industrialists, jewellers and doctors was also involved in the murder of owner of S. S. Jewellers in Old Gurgaon in the late 1990s. Dilip was arrested in 2001 following which the gang fell apart. With the passage of time, some of the gangs were neutralised by the police and others fell apart with their leaders being arrested and put behind the bars leading to peace in the area, said the police sources. In 2006 Chailu, a notorious gangster, was shot dead in a gun battle with a rival group at Rajiv Chowk.
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A major hub of economic activity, Gurgaon is also notorious for its trigger-happy culture with the most shocking case being that of a 14-year-old student of a well-known school who was shot dead by two of his classmates inside the school premises in 2007. The victim and the two assailants belonged to families of realtors and had a scuffle two days earlier over a minor issue. In a similar case, a toll attendant was shot dead by a commuter at the Kherki Daula toll plaza on Delhi-Gurgaon expressway in September last following an argument over payment of toll.
The criminals operating in southern Haryana, mostly from the Mewat region, also sneak into the Capital to commit crimes and the issues regarding their activities are frequently taken up by the Delhi Police with their Haryana counterparts, especially at the inter-State coordination meetings.
The city has been one of the chosen routes of numerous gangs from Mewat who perpetrate violent crimes like murder, dacoity and carjacking in the Capital.
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“The influx of hardened criminals from Mewat, who are usually armed with country-made weapons, has been a steady trend since long. A sizable part of crimes reported in the Capital can be attributed to these gangs which employs ruthless ways. They operate in large groups, mostly use mini-trucks as getaways and resort to firing or even pelting the police with stones to evade arrest. On several occasions, they are even knocked down and attempted to kill policemen on their trail,” said a police officer.
“In fact, we have arrested a large number of such criminals,” said a police officer.
Investigations have revealed that even sophisticated illicit weapons being manufactured at Munger in Bihar besides Muzaffarnagar, Bulandshahr and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh are getting into the hands of criminals operating in Gurgaon.
Another area of concern is personal enmities, property dispute being a major factor, which on several occasions spills over across the border at times leading to violent clashes in the outskirts of Delhi.