Two alleged gangsters from Punjab were killed in an encounter with the Special Task Force (STF) of the West Bengal police in the New town area of Kolkata on Wednesday afternoon.
Officials of the STF said a policemen suffered bullet injuries in the operation and had been hospitalised.
“Jaypal (Bhullar) and Jaspreet (Singh) had killed two ASIs [Assisant sub inspectors] in Ludhiana, Punjab, on May 15. There was a cash reward on them,” Additional Director-General of Police, STF, Vineet Kumar Goyal told presspersons. The police said the two gangsters had been hiding in the city for the past few days.
The encounter took place in a posh housing complex in New Town in the northeastern fringes of the city around 3.30 p.m., creating panic among the residents. Several rounds were fired during the encounter.
Police officials said that when they knocked the doors of flat no 201 on the second floor of Tower B of the residential complex, they were fired at from inside.
The officers said they wanted to make arrests, but were forced to open fire in self-defence.
Five sophisticated pistols, 89 rounds of live ammunitions and ₹7 lakh in cash were recovered from the flat, Mr. Goyal said.
The injured STF officer, Kartik Mohan Ghosh, was undergoing treatment at a hospital in Salt Lake.
A team of Central Investigation Department of the West Bengal Police was sanitising the place to check whether explosive or arms were hidden there. Mr. Goyal said a team of the Punjab Police had reached Kolkata.
