AHMEDABAD: A man wanted for three murders — one each in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh — was arrested from his house in Mumbai on Monday. Accused Manish Singh is also wanted in 16 other offences, said city crime branch officers on Wednesday.
Manish, who had a Rs 50,000 reward on his head, worked for notorious gangster Subhash Singh Thakur from Varanasi.
Police sources said that Manish came to Ahmedabad in 2015 and posed as Shivlal Yadav. “After adopting the new identity, he worked as a financier in the city and kept travelling between Mumbai and Ahmedabad to run his illegal business. He was also involved in robbing gold worth Rs 23 lakh from a jewellery shop in Manek Chowk in October 2019,” they said.
Cops said that Manish’s criminal journey began in 2007 when he joined Thakur’s gang and opened fire at two rival gang members in Varanasi. In the same year, he took a contract to kill a man named R K Singh, director of a hotel group in Uttar Pradesh. The contract had been given by Singh’s business partner Ashok Talreja, who was shot by Manish in 2012 over a money dispute.
In 2009, Manish went to Mumbai where he tried to extort money from Krishan Shetty, a bar owner in Santacruz. When Shetty refused to give him money, Manish tried to kill him too. According to police, he continued to extort money from various people and opened fire at some of them too. He was charged with six cases of attempt to murder and under sections of the arms act.
In 2014, he shot two people at a petrol pump in Botad town and killed them. In 2015, he came to Ahmedabad.
Crime branch personnel were looking for Shivlal Yadav in connection with the Manek Chowk gold robbery when they got to know through an informer that Yadav was Manish Singh who was involved in 19 offences, including three murders and six attempted murder cases. During the probe, they traced him to Vasai.
A team of the crime branch went to Vasai, stayed there for 10 days at Evershine flats and nabbed Manish when he came there for his father’s shraddh rituals. The cops brought him to the city and produced him in a local court that remanded him to police custody for seven days.
