A week after the South Delhi gang war, the sixth absconding accused has been arrested by the Crime Branch on Saturday. The accused identified as Anup Kumar Tiwari, 28, was the driver of gangster Deepak Pandit for four years.
According to Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ravindra Yadav, the sixth absconding accused has been arrested, identified as Anup Kumar Tiwari. Of the six assailants, Anup Tiwari was the only one who managed to escape despite a combing operation launched by police. He was nabbed by a Crime Branch team on Thursday near ISKCON temple in South Delhi based on a tip-off. Tiwari has been handed over to the Greater Kailash police station where a case against him had been registered in connection with Sunday’s incident.
On the intervening night, between August 22 and 23, Pandit and his associates had allegedly shot dead another gangster-turned-property dealer Raju Ramakant Rao at an intersection in South Delhi’s Greater Kailash area.
They first hit Rao’s motorbike with their Scorpio SUV, being driven by Tiwari, and then opened fire at him. Tiwari was constantly changing his hideouts after the incident and the district police could not track him despite conducting raids at several locations in Delhi-NCR.
“On Friday evening, police arrested him near ISKCON temple where he had come to meet an associate,” said the joint commissioner of police.
After the SUV was chased by a police team, Tiwari sped the vehicle towards Greater Kailash I and ended up entering a residential lane with no further escape route.
After the SUV rammed into an iron gate, the occupants rushed out of the vehicle and scattered around.
While five of the alleged assailants chose to hide in and around a park, and later got pinned down one after another by policemen, who were helped by residents and security guards, Tiwari chose to take shelter inside a building, a senior police official of south-east district said.
The next day, one of the CCTV grabs, obtained from S Block of GK-I, revealed that Tiwari had escaped from the locality between 8.30 am and 9 am, long after the action was over, the police official said.
Police are yet to recover six lakh rupees in cash, which Rao was reported to be carrying at the time of the incident. He was heading towards southwest Delhi’s Tigri village after collecting the cash from a property consultant in outer Delhi.