'Things have reached a flashpoint where Nadeem could just do anything'

Even as the Uttar Pradesh police located the dismembered body of Vikram Wahi, the hitman who allegedly killed Gulshan Kumar, a senior UP police officer denied reports that he knew of the threat to the music mogul's life.

Wahi's head was recovered from the Siddharth Nagar district of eastern UP. The rest of the body, in three parts, was recovered from Krishna Nagar in Nepal on August 30. Confirmation of the criminal's identity came only after photographs of the body were identified by Wahi's relatives in Lucknow.

"Photographs of the re-constructed body have also been sent to the Bombay police," U K Bansal, Inspector General of Police, Gorakhpur zone, told Rediff On The NeT.

Inspector General of Police, Meerut zone, Vikram Singh, meanwhile, denied reports that he knew of the threat to Gulshan Kumar's life from Bollywood composer Nadeem. Singh said Bombay Police Commissioner Ronald Hyacinth Mendonca's reported statement that Gulshan Kumar had complained to the Meerut police about the threat was "grossly incorrect and misleading."

But Singh admitted having once met Gulshan Kumar at someone's house. The music magnate, the IGP disclosed, had said then that his differences with Nadeem was touching "explosive heights".

Singh recalled Gulshan Kumar telling him, "Nadeem has started resorting to arm-twisting and things have reached a flash point where Nadeem could just do anything."

The IGP also remembered Gulshan Kumar telling him that he had informed the Bombay police, the Maharashtra chief minister and senior Shiv Sena leaders about the threats to his life. "But Gulshan Kumar never told me anything categorically about the threat to his life," Singh said.

The Meerut police chief says he had nothing to do with providing security to the Super Cassettes boss. The two security personnel provided to Gulshan Kumar by the UP police a couple of years ago was part of a state government policy to protect industrialists in the NOIDA-Ghaziabad region from kidnappers.

Asked why the UP security personnel were not present when Gulshan Kumar was killed on August 12, Singh said they could not move outside Uttar Pradesh without permission from the state police chief. If the policemen had done so earlier, the IGP said, they had been violating the rules.

With Wahi's death, the Gulshan Kumar murder case has become murkier. One police theory is that Wahi's enemies in Bombay's Chhota Rajan gang may have caught up with him; another, that he was eliminated by those who hired him, to erase direct evidence.

Wahi was reportedly once an associate of Chandra Swami and gangster Babloo Srivastava, who is currently in prison. The police say he often worked for fugitive gangster Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar which earned him Chhota Rajan's wrath.

The slain hitman was a student at Lucknow's St Francis' School, but was expelled for assaulting a teacher. He later studied at a coaching institute, but drifted into crime sometime in 1989-90, becoming a contract killer.

His relatives said they had no knowledge about the whereabouts of his mother and two sisters. "His mother was so fed up of his activities that she disowned him five years ago," a relative was quoted as saying. Which is probably why no one has come to claim Wahi's body so far.

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