A Mumbai court on April 26 remanded to police custody, till April 30, two men arrested from Punjab in connection with the firing outside Bollywood superstar Salman Khan’s residence in Bandra. Subhash Chander (37) and Anuj Thapan (32) were produced before a magistrate’s court.
The crime branch on April 25 arrested the duo, who had allegedly provided weapons and cartridges to the shooters, from Punjab. The police informed the court that the accused were key persons in the crime and were arrested based on technical evidence.
“They need to be interrogated to find out who supplied them with weapons and asked them to give the same to the two shooters arrested earlier,” police said.
The police have alleged that Chander and Thapan had come to Panvel (in Raigad district near Mumbai) on March 15 to hand over two country-made pistols and 38 live rounds to the shooters Sagar Pal and Vicky Gupta. The court on Thursday remanded Pal (21) and Gupta (24) to police custody till April 29.
Besides these four accused, the police have declared jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi and his younger brother Anmol Bishnoi as wanted accused in the case.
Appearing for the accused, advocate Ajay Dubey submitted that Chander and Thapan had not provided weapons to the other accused or visited Panvel, and they had no connection to the Bishnoi gang.
“All charges against them are baseless, and they were falsely implicated in the case,” he said. Gupta and Pal allegedly fired outside 58-year-old Khan’s house at the Galaxy Apartment in Bandra in the early hours of April 14 before fleeing the spot on a motorbike. They were apprehended from Mata No Madh village in Gujarat’s Kutch district on April 16.
The crime branch team later recovered two pistols, magazines and bullets from the Tapi river in Gujarat during a search operation to recover weapons allegedly used in the firing.
