Chandigarh/Kolkata, Jun 9: Two alleged gangsters involved in killing two policemen recently in Ludhiana, were gunned down by a Kolkata police team in a shootout there in the metropolis on Wednesday, a top Punjab police official said.
Gangsters Jaipal Singh Bhullar and Jaspreet Singh Jassi were shot dead by a Special Task Force team of the Kolkata police on “pin-pointed” information provided by the Punjab Police about the gangsters’ hideout in a housing society in the New Town area of the city, he said.
In the operation, which took place at around 3:30 pm, a Kolkata police inspector too was injured, he said.
“We wanted to arrest them and asked them to surrender. But as they started firing, we had to fire in self-defence,” West Bengal STF’s Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) Vineet Goel told reporters earlier in Kolkata.
The Punjab Police had earlier informed the Bengal police about the two, but no representative of that force was present during the raid, Goel said.
The Punjab police had declared earlier an award of Rs 10 lakh on Ferozepur resident Bhullar’s arrest and that of Rs 5 lakh over Mohali man Jassi’s apprehension, the Punjab police official said in Chandigarh.
Bhullar and Jassi had been on the run since the killings of two assistant sub-inspectors at the new grain market at Jagraon in Ludhina.
Their two other accomplices were nabbed by a joint team of Punjab and Madhya Pradesh at a railway station near Gwalior, minutes before they were to take a train to Maharashtra on May 28.
Addressing a news conference here, Punjab Director General of Police (DGP) Dinkar Gupta said Jaipal Bhullar was an ‘A’ category gangster and was involved in the killing of the two ASIs last month at Jagraon in Ludhiana.
Gupta said after they came to know that both Bhullar and Jaspreet were holed up in a rented apartment in Kolkata, the Punjab police dispatched a special team to Kolkata by flight on Wednesday.
“In the meanwhile, we also coordinated with Kolkata Police to share pinpointed inputs regarding their current hideout for the arrest of these two most-wanted drug smugglers,” said Gupta.
The DGP said a senior police officer from Kolkata police informed later in the afternoon that both the criminals had been killed in retaliatory firing by the Kolkata STF in which one of their police inspectors had also sustained bullet injuries.
He said four pistols had been recovered from the flat by the STF of the Kolkata police. “I am grateful to the West Bengal police, especially the ADGP & STF Chief of West Bengal, Vineet Goyal, who acted immediately on inputs provided by the Punjab police and organised a raid at the Kolkata apartment where Bhullar was holed up along with his associate, Jassi,” said Gupta. (PTI)
