BHOPAL: Nine members of the Madhya Pradesh Police’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (MP ATS) have been suspended following the custodial death of a suspect in a terror funding case at a hotel in Gurugram, Haryana.
A departmental probe will be conducted against them by the IG-Law and Order of MP Police.
The deceased, 27-year-old Himanshu Kumar, reportedly fell from the third floor of the hotel on January 7 while allegedly attempting to escape custody.
The suspended officers include an inspector, sub-inspector, assistant sub-inspector, head constable, and constables. According to MP ATS sources, the incident occurred on the afternoon of January 7.
Himanshu, one of six men in ATS custody until the afternoon of January 7, reportedly asked to use the restroom. During this time, he allegedly tried to flee but fell from the balcony when officers attempted to stop him.
Himanshu sustained critical injuries and was rushed to a government hospital in Sohna, where doctors declared him dead on arrival.
Following the incident, a judicial inquiry has been ordered, to be conducted by a senior division judicial magistrate in Haryana.
Based on a complaint by Himanshu’s uncle, Chandan Kumar, a murder case has been registered against the MP ATS officers at the Sohna City Police Station in Gurugram. The case includes charges of murder, wrongful confinement, and voluntarily causing hurt.
Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Sohna, Abhilaksh Joshi, confirmed the details, saying, “A case of murder, wrongful confinement, and voluntarily causing hurt has been registered under relevant sections against the MP ATS team based on the complaint by Himanshu’s uncle.”
The matter remains under investigation, with judicial and police inquiries ongoing.
Chandan Kumar, a resident of Madhepura district in Bihar, claimed that his nephew Himanshu was innocent and was wrongfully confined by the MP ATS without any warrant.
“After picking up Himanshu and others for questioning, why didn’t the MP ATS team take them to the local police station? Why did they take them to a hotel? Why did the MP Police team not take the local police into confidence before conducting the alleged operation on January 7 morning? How was my nephew Himanshu taken into custody for questioning without any warrant?” Himanshu’s uncle, Chandan Kumar (who runs a construction firm in Jalandhar), said while talking to this newspaper over the phone on Friday.
Himanshu’s other uncle, Pravesh, further said, “Himanshu was regularly talking to me over the phone. He was earlier preparing for Bihar police recruitment and also Army recruitment while in Bihar. After the festival of Chhath, he came to Gurugram and started living there. He told me that he was working with someone to fund his preparations for a government job. We were planning to go to Shimla and the Golden Temple in Amritsar in the coming days, but those plans will never be fulfilled.”
The FIR registered by Himanshu’s uncle mentions the recovery of 14 laptops, 85 debit cards, and 41 cell phones from the Gurugram flat.
Importantly, the FIR of the case registered against the MP ATS team by Himanshu’s uncle in Gurugram mentions that the MP ATS team picked up six men from flat no. 905 of Serenas Tower 3, a multi-storied building in Gurugram’s Sohna area, at 5:30 am on January 7.
Besides Himanshu (aka Manoj Kumar), the five others included Mohamad Masooq and Chanchal Vishwakarma (both natives of Madhya Pradesh) and Ramnath Kumar, Govind Kumar, and Neeraj Yadav (all from Bihar).
Grilling of all six men, including Himanshu, before his death, revealed that all of them were involved in cyber fraud. Two of them, Mohammad Masooq and Chanchal Vishwakarma (both from MP), were already accused in a case of cyber fraud registered by the MP police’s cyber cell in Jabalpur.
Searches of the Gurugram flat from where the six men were picked up by the MP ATS led to the recovery of 14 laptops, one tablet, 41 cell phones, 85 debit cards from various banks, five QR codes, and a large number of SIM cards.
According to informed sources, the recovery made from the flat suggests that the concerned flat in Gurugram was being used by the men from MP and Bihar to operate a call center involved in cyber fraud.
Importantly, the MP ATS team, which raided the flat in Dhunela (Sohna) area of Gurugram on January 7 in the early morning, had specific inputs about the cyber fraudsters being engaged in terror financing through the hawala route.
The cyber fraud case and suspected terror financing:
After Himanshu Kumar’s death on January 7 at the Gurugram hotel, the remaining five accused have been arrested by the MP Police’s cyber cell in connection with a 2024 cyber fraud case in which 12 men have already been arrested by the state police in the recent past.
As many as 16 teams of the MP police’s cyber cell recently arrested 12 men, who hail from Jabalpur and Satna districts in MP’s Vindhya and Mahakoshal regions. Cash totaling Rs 15 lakh, 27 passbooks from different banks, 48 debit/ATM cards, ATM swipe machines, eight laptops, and 20 cell phones were seized from the 12 men arrested in MP in the cyber fraud case.
“The operation was carried out based on inputs provided by the ATS. The ATS received solid inputs about suspected terror financing and its possible overseas connections, which is why the team swooped on the Gurugram flat on January 7 in the early morning,” a source involved in the ongoing MP police probe confided to this newspaper.
With the five men detained from Gurugram now with the MP Police’s cyber cell team investigating the 2024 fraud case, many big revelations may come to light in the coming weeks, including pan-India links of the racket, its possible overseas connections, and suspected hawala-based terror funding.
It may also bring to the fore the involvement of employees of many private and government banks in MP who possibly helped the cyber fraudsters open mule accounts to meet their banking targets and receive increased commissions.