A joint team of Special Task Force (STF) and lucknow police successfully nabbed four active members of infamous Chandan Singh’s gang from a hotel in Hazratganj on Monday.
Those arrested were identified as Rana Paratap Singh aka Pinku Singh and Akhilesh Yadav, both of Gorakhpur, Radhey Shyam Singh of Padrauna
and Arvind Mal of Sitapur district. The gang had checked in the hotel on a fake identity card. Radhey Shyam is a retired Nayak from Signal Core of Army and is real maternal uncle of Pinku Singh who was heading the gang after his mentor Chandan landed into police dragnet and was put behind the bars.
The STF officials said the gang had notoriety of freeing jailed criminals by attacking the jails, drugging the policemen escorting criminals of their gang to court for hearing besides demanding extortion from contractors, engineers, doctors and public representatives. “The gang members even not spared prominent public representatives on several occasions in the past and they used to kill their target on slightest of provocation,’ the STF officials said.
The countdown of their arrest started after they planned to free their mentor Chandan who was locked in Barabanki jail by bombing the jail superintendent’s official residence under the supervision of Pinku Singh. However, as the news was leaked in police, Chandan was transferred to lucknow jail. As the brain behind the master plan was still behind the curtain, the cops started to work on the point-man.
It surfaced that Pinku, who had fled from the police custody in Shajanwa when he was being escorted to Sant Kabir Nagar court from Gorakhpur jail, was running the gang in the absence of Chandan. The police furthered its probe on this line and subsequently came to know that Pinku and his aides were planning to free Chandan when he would be escorted to court.
The tip-off was a real challenge for the police which worked on the case roping in experts having good network of informers in the underworld. The police team got to know that Pinku had checked in a hotel and swooped down there and arrested him and his aides. Pinku owned up his crime and told police that he was running the gang as a defacto kingpin of the gang and also disclosed that he had planned to free Chandan. He had his aides also owned that they had planned to bomb the official residence of jail superintendent of Barabanki.