UP’s most-wanted gangster was tipped off about police action

Did the Uttar Pradesh police walk into a trap laid by the state’s most-wanted gangster Vikash Dubey? Initial inquiry suggests so, as it is believed that the gangster was being tipped off about the police action.

Daya Shankar Agnihotri, an accomplice of the dreaded gangster, who was arrested on Sunday morning after a brief encounter in Kalyanpur area has admitted that Vikas Dubey had received a call that a police team would preparing to raid his house.

 Agnihotri, who was inside Dubey’s house during the encounter, worked as a cook in Dubey’s house and his wife worked as a maid. He said that he did not know how to operate a gun and was sleeping when the firing began. He has also said that he was locked inside the house when Vikas Dubey and his men attacked the police personnel. “I saw nothing,” Daya Shankar Agnihotri said.

Call details of phones used by Vikas Dubey have revealed that he was in regular touch with the suspended station house officer of Chaubeypur, Vinay Tiwari, one police constable and a home guard.

A senior STF official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to IANS, said that Vinay Tiwari was being interrogated and further investigations in the matter were on. Tiwari was suspended on Saturday for his alleged connivance in tipping-off the notorious local criminal Vikas Dubey. The STF official refused to divulge further details saying that it would affect investigations.

Sources said that the phones of Vikas Dubey had been switched off a few hours after he fled. The phones of his friends, relatives, associated had been put on surveillance but Dubey had not contacted any of them so far.

Station officer Bithoor police station, Kaushalendra Pratap Singh, who was injured in the Friday incident and is undergoing treatment at the Regency hospital, told reporters on Sunday that they were not prepared for an encounter and most of the policemen were unarmed. He said that as soon as the police team reached the spot where the earthmover had been strategically positioned, firing began.

With agency inputs