Four days after a gangster from Jammu, Rajesh Dogra, 45, was shot dead in broad daylight outside CP67 mall in Sector 67 on March 4, Mohali police have cracked the case with the arrest of five shooters from the rival Bakra gang.

The murder was a fallout of a long-standing gang war between Bakra gang and Dogra’s Billu gang, said police.

Among the five arrested shooters, two are former cops with a tainted past.

Bakra gang’s kingpin Anil Singh, alias Billa of Samba, Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), was dismissed from the police force and his associate Sham Lal of Udhampur, J&K, was suspended.

The other three shooters include Harpreet Singh, alias Preet, of Meerut, Uttar Pradesh (UP); Satveer Singh, of Pilibhit, UP, and Sandeep Singh, alias Soni, of Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab.

Police have been granted custody till March 14 to quiz the five shooters for leads about their three absconding accomplices.

They are all facing charges under Sections 302 (murder) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code, and under the Arms Act.

Spent ₹1 crore on murder plot since 2015

Police said both gangs hailed from Jammu and were involved in multiple heinous crimes. Their rivalry went back to 2006 and the Bakra gang had been planning to eliminate Dogra, the kingpin of Billu gang, since 2015 after he killed a prominent member of their gang.

Bakra gang’s kingpin Anil Singh already has 15 FIRs registered against him, eight of them for murder.

The conspiracy to kill Dogra had cost them around ₹1 crore over the past nine years, said investigators. They gathered this money through extortion and utilised it to acquire vehicles, weapons and ammunition for the crime, using fake address proofs.

Addressing the media, Mohali senior superintendent of police Sandeep Kumar Garg shared that Bakra gang had planned to kill Rajesh earlier as well when he came out of jail on parole in Jammu. However, their plot failed, as he returned to jail.

Cache of weapons recovered

The SSP said the arrest of the five shooters led to recovery of five pistols of different calibres, one 12-bore pump action gun and 71 live cartridges. This includes two cartridges of .30 bore, 19 cartridges of .32 bore and 50 cartridges of .12 bore.

The police official said four weapons were used in the crime and two were kept for back up.

A total of four vehicles, including Hyundai Creta, Toyota Innova and Maruti Suzuki Brezza that were used in the crime, and a Toyota Fortuner that was stationed in Zirakpur for fleeing, have also been recovered. The Fortuner was recovered from Zirakpur, Creta from Phase 9, Mohali, Innova from Banur and Brezza from Jammu.

Victim was planning to visit Ayodhya

The police have also uncovered that Dogra was intending to visit Ayodhya with one Sandeep Singh Raja, who was initially a member of his own gang but had switched loyalties. Raja, who remained in contact with Dogra, called him to CP67 Mall and disclosed his identity to the shooters, who then executed the murder. Raja remains at large.

During preliminary investigation, police had found that Dogra, who was facing multiple criminal cases, including murder, had recently come out of jail. He was also convicted for the murder of underworld don Sanjay Gupta, alias Bakra, in 2006 and had served a 13-year sentence in this case.