Mumbai: The 29-year-old nephew of dreaded gangster Sadiq Kalia, who was killed in a police encounter in 1999, was arrested in Nagpur on Friday for avenging his uncle’s death.
Sadiq Javar was barely two years old when Kalia was killed. Yet, 27 years later, he allegedly went looking for the man he blamed for it — an “informant” whose tip-off allegedly led to Kalia’s killing by a team led by “encounter specialist” Daya Nayak, the Mumbai Police said.
The alleged informant, Iqbal Ibrahim Seliya (78) was alone at his home in Nagpada on April 20 when two men walked in and attacked him with a chopper. They struck him more than 20 times and left only after making sure he was dead. When Seliya’s wife and son returned home, they found him lying in a pool of blood, the police said, as reported by The Indian Express.
The Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch tracked down Javar and his associate Naushad Mithani (22) in Nagpur on Friday.
Kalia apparently grew up in Kalachowki under difficult circumstances, selling shoes on the pavement
footpath to get by in the 1990s. When members of the Dawood Ibrahim gang came around collecting hafta (protection money), Kalia refused to pay. That “fearlessness” caught the attention of gangster Chhota Shakeel who recruited him into the gang, a police officer said.
Kalia and sharpshooter Munna Jhingada, who is now believed to be in Pakistan, allegedly carried out multiple killings across Mumbai, through the mid-to-late 1990s. In late 1999, Nayak and his police team were waiting for Kalia in Dadar, where he had allegedly come to kill a prominent political leader.
Javar, then a toddler, grew up in the shadow of that encounter and came to believe that Seliya had been the informant who sealed his uncle’s fate, the police said. Incidentally, Javar was also related to Seliya.
Javar and Mithani killed Seliya around 6.45 pm and their movements were captured by CCTV cameras, the police said.
The two made their way to Antop Hill after the murder. From there, they went to Vidyavihar, where they boarded a train to Kalyan before hiring a vehicle to drive through the night to Nagpur, over 700 km away.
The Crime Branch acted on technical surveillance, and a team followed the trail and caught up with them within four days. The accused allegedly confessed and described their escape route in detail, the police said.
Senior Inspector Pradeep Kale of Nagpada police station told the newspaper that the investigation was “ongoing”.