Gangster involved in H’bagh court shootout held

After two months, the most wanted gangster of the coal belt of Jharkhand has been nabbed by Delhi Police Special Cell in connection to the sensational shootout in Hazaribagh court complex in June.

Vikas Nath Tiwari, the accused had orchestrated the killing of the chief of his rival gang, Sushil Srivastava who was sprayed with 30 bullets fired from an AK-47 assault rifle. According to police, he was arrested from Chelmsford Road while he was on his way to the New Delhi Railway Station to catch a train.

“The shootout took place on June 2 when a man with an AK-47 rifle had sprayed bullets inside a court complex in Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh District, killing three people, as a two-decade-old gang war for dominance over a lucrative extortion business in the eastern state flared up in which gangster Sushil Srivastava and two of his henchmen were killed while a police constable and a civilian were injured after the man riding pillion on a motorcycle opened fire,” Sanjeev Yadav, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) said.

Officials said that the killings were spurred by the bitter feud between Srivastava’s syndicate and the Bhola Pandey gang, as they jockeyed for a bigger share of the pie in the trade of extracting protection money from coal merchants in the Ranchi, Ramgarh and Hazaribagh districts. “An injured constable had retaliated and shot the attacker on his leg. However, after discarding the weapon on the spot, the perpetrators managed to flee the scene on a motorcycle,” the official added.

It was learned that the gang war dates back to the late nineties when the deceased Sushil Srivastava had challenged the Bhola Pandey led gang’s supremacy over the extortion rackets. In recurrent encounters between the two groups, Srivastava’s men had killed Pandey’s several aides before eliminating the rival leader in a shootout on the national highway connecting Ranchi to Hazaribag.

At a time when it seemed that the Pandey group had been wiped out, his disciple Vikas Tiwari had sprung a surprise by avenging the killings by ruthlessly eliminating Sushil Srivastava.

The Jharkhand Police has been informed of the arrest with further investigation in progress, police said.