Bhubaneswar: Dreaded gangster Sheikh Hyder (58), who succumbed to bullet injuries sustained in police firing near Simulia in Balasore on Saturday afternoon, had spent the last 16 years in various jails across Odisha.
The encounter took place around 3.20 pm while Hyder was being shifted to the sub-jail in Baripada from Choudwar Circle Jail, where he was lodged following his re-arrest from Sangareddy district in Telangana on April 15 this year, five days after he escaped from SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack.
The wily gangster is believed to have fled from ward No 5 of the surgery department of SCB at 4.30 pm on April 10 after spraying sanitiser on 4 personnel escorting him. He had checked into the hospital on March 23. The role of prison authorities and health officials in the whole episode had come under the scanner.
CRIMINAL ANTECEDENTS
Over 15 cases are lodged against Hyder, including seven in Kendrapada and the rest in Bhubaneswar and Puri districts. The charges include murder, attempt to murder, extortion, loot and tender-fixing.
The gangster was known to plan and execute crimes from inside the jail. He rose to fame after killing Sheikh Chuna, brother of his arch-rival Sheikh Suleiman in Kendrapada, near Stewart School at Delta Square in Bhubaneswar on May 31, 2005. He was arrested from Nagpur the same year. In 2011, Additional District Sessions Judge Court of Khurda (located in Bhubaneswar) sentenced him and his seven associates to life imprisonment in the sensational broad daylight murder.
He was said to be enjoying political patronage, which had helped him spread his network in Kendrapada, which had turned into a hotbed of criminal activities in the 1990s and the turn of the millennium.
Though Hyder got parole from the court in 2014, police arrested and forwarded him to the court for his complicity in the kidnap-murder of Rashmi Ranjan Mohapatra, a Keonjhar-based businessman trading in mines and mineral products, in 2007.
Hyder was lodged in Jharpada Special Jail in Bhubaneswar after a court awarded him a life sentence in the case in 2015. He was found guilty on charges of kidnapping for ransom and extortion. Hyder and four others had allegedly killed Mohapatra and his driver despite receiving Rs 1.12 crore as ransom.
The gangster was later shifted to the district jail in Sambalpur on May 2, 2017, following reports of a gang war with his rival Dhalasamanta brothers.
EARLY LIFE
In the 1980s, the unschooled Hyder earned a living by pulling a rickshaw. His contacts with local criminal Rabindra Behera alias Rabin led him into the world of crime and eventually saw his rise in the ranks of gangsters.
A resident of Dilharpur locality of Kendrapada town, Hyder had reportedly married twice and fathered three sons and as many daughters, whom he had married off.
Hyder was reportedly operating his crime network from inside the jail through his sons. While one of his sons Sheikh Muna is in jail another is absconding.
Following his death, his wife Hasina Bibi said police had deliberately killed him.
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