Baba Siddique murder: Main shooter returned to murder spot, visited Lilavati Hospital to confirm death

The Mumbai police, while investigating the murder of NCP leader Baba Siddique, have learnt that the main shooter, Shiv Kumar Gautam, visited the spot of the firing in Bandra East after the crime and later even went to Lilavati Hospital in Bandra West to confirm Siddique’s death.

On November 10, the Mumbai Crime Branch and the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force arrested Shiv Kumar from Nanpara in UP’s Bahraich district. “Since then, he has been interrogated by the Mumbai police, as he was a close aide of one of the key accused, Shubham Lonkar, and was in touch with incarcerated gangster Lawrence Bishnoi’s brother, Anmol,” said a senior Mumbai Crime Branch officer.

During his interrogation, Shiv Kumar revealed how he fled after the murder, changed his shirt, kept his used shirt and the murder weapon in a bag and dumped the bag under an abandoned car just 250 metres from the spot. He then came back to the spot and waited for around ten minutes.

“He saw that the police had reached, and that Baba Siddique was rushed to Lilavati Hospital,” said the police officer. “After he did not get any news about Siddique there, he went to Lilavati Hospital where he waited till he got news of Siddique’s death.” The police recovered the bag with the shirt and pistol after two days.

From Lilavati Hospital, Shiv Kumar left in an auto for Kurla railway station. From Kurla he went to Thane and from there to Pune. He waited for a few hours, then took a train to Uttar Pradesh. He destroyed his phone on the way and purchased a new one in Lucknow.

“The three shooters had planned to meet at Ujjain after the murder, and even visit Vaishnodevi temple in Jammu,” said the police officer. “However, as Shiv Kumar’s fellow shooters got arrested at the murder spot, he left for UP. From there he took a bus and reached Bahraich, from where he planned to flee to Nepal. He was in a safe house when he was arrested.”

Police investigations revealed that two accused, Gaurav Apune and another accused, had even carried out firing practice in a forest in Jharkhand with a high-end weapon and were to be given a hit job to eliminate a Pune-based politician.

Meanwhile the Crime Branch, the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad and the Akot Police, who had earlier arrested Shubham Lonkar in a separate case, have allegedly found that the Lawrence Bishnoi gang had planned to eliminate Aftab Poonawala. Poonawala was arrested in November 2022 by the Delhi police for allegedly killing his live-in partner, Shraddha Walkar, chopping her body and putting it in his refrigerator. “Aftab was a fit target for the gang, as the case had taken the media by storm and also fitted in with their radical views,” said the police officer.

Lonkar, who was radicalised by the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, had allegedly planned to eliminate Poonawala outside the Saket court, New Delhi, where his trial is on. However, he could not proceed with the plan, as he was still searching for trained shooters to carry out the hit job in Delhi. Till then, he was assigned the work of murdering Baba Siddique.

“Lonkar wanted to join the army, but his attempts failed in 2018,” said the police officer. “He was indoctrinated by Lawrence from Gujarat Jail. He had started a WhatsApp group, ‘Balaatkari Log’, with the aim of killing all rapists and cleansing society. He was trained in Azerbaijan and Nepal by the group in handling high-end weapons.”