New Delhi, Oct 30 (IANS) Gangster Munna Bajrangi, who was arrested in Mumbai Thursday, has confessed to killing over 40 people in the past 20 years, police said Friday.
"When we asked him about how many people he had killed so far, he vaguely said 40 to 50 people," a senior police officer, who interrogated him, told IANS on condition of strict anonymity.
Most of his victims were either politicians or those who refused to cough up the extortion money demanded by him.
"Bajrangi is also a close aide of mafia don Mukhtar Ansari and had carried out many contract killings," the officer added.
Bajrangi, for whose arrest the police had offered a cash reward of Rs.700,000, was arrested along with his accomplice Mahender alias Shetty from the high-profile Siddivinayak residential society in Mumbai's Malad area. He was living in one of the apartments under his real name Prem Prakash Singh, along with his wife and three teenaged children for the past six years.
"He rarely came out of his home and never used a mobile phone. If he had to call someone, he would go to Goa to make phone calls and then destroy both the mobile phone and its SIM card," the officer said.
In 1996, Bajrangi allegedly murdered Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Ramachandra Singh in Jaunpur and the same party's Anil Rai in Varanasi in 2003. In 2005, he murdered the BJP's Uttar Pradesh legislator Krishnanand Rai along with his seven bodyguards.
Bajrangi was almost underground for the past six years. After 2005, it was this year that a case of extortion was registered against him in New Delhi. "Nobody wants to come forward to give complaint against him," the official said.
Delhi Police started tracing Bajrangi three years ago after getting to know that he had extorted money from a city businessman and was trying to establish his network in the capital. A team of the special cell had visited Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Daman, Rajasthan, Orissa and West Bengal in an effort to track him.
Delhi Police Commissioner Y.S. Dadwal said they would also be interrogating Bajrangi for the murder of "encounter specialist", Assistant Commissioner of Police Rajbir Singh, last year.
"We would be interrogating him for everything," he told reporters here in a press conference.
However, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which investigated the murder, failed to find any evidence against Bajrangi.
Police said they would seek Bajrangi's police custody for further investigations into the cases, while Uttar Pradesh police and CBI officials have also expressed their interest in his interrogation.
The CBI has declared a reward of Rs.500,000 for his arrest in the Rai murder case, while Uttar Pradesh police has put a reward of Rs.200,000. Bajrangi was allegedly involved in various cases of murder, extortion, robbery and abduction in the state.