Dinesh Kumar Mittal, real estate major, might be quizzed now for allegedly sheltering Bunty, Delhi’s ‘most-wanted’ criminal who was gunned down

Already in jail for his brother-in-law Arun Gupta’s murder, Dinesh Kumar Mittal, real estate major, might be quizzed now for allegedly sheltering Bunty, Delhi’s ‘most-wanted’ criminal who was gunned down on Monday. South district police officials today said they would seek police remand of Mittal to interrogate him about Om Prakash, alias Bunty. Police sources said Mittal might be charged with harbouring a criminal if evidence crops up against him. Bunty, leader of the biker gang that shot at least four people in the last couple of months, was killed in an encounter with the police in a godown allegedly owned by Mittal in Jaitpur village, Badarpur, early on Monday. Police said Bunty was cooped up in the godown with his associate Rajesh for the last fortnight or so. Mittal is at present lodged in jail and police are scrutinising jail records for all those who visited him in the past few weeks. Senior officers had yesterday refused to speculate on the slain criminal’s connection with Mittal, whose family owned the controversial Mittal Gardens in Mehrauli. Sources said Bunty was in the godown for the last 15 days even as Delhi Police teams were fanned out across the NCR, raiding possible hideouts in Haryana and UP. “We also want to know whether Mittal had asked Bunty to stay in his godown to execute a murder,” an officer said.
According to sources, Bunty had spent the money he had recently looted — Rs 45,000 from Noida; Rs 60,000 from Mayur Vihar; Rs 5 lakh from Madangir — to buy arms and ammunition besides distributing it among fellow gang members. Officials are now checking details of his visits over the past two months, and people he had befriended. The police have also roped in experts to decode Bunty’s “self-made codes”, found his diary. Sources said he had written contacts of at least 60 persons, with codes that went in a slightly bizarre way — P stood for 9, B for 3, and so forth. “We would locate those people once the numbers are decoded,” a source said. “For now we can only guess, that these are numbers of gangsters and criminals with whom Bunty had, or sought, contact.” The police suspect Bunty and Rajesh had come to the city to kill the two Ambedkar Nagar shopowners, Pawan and Naresh, who the gang had shot at last month. Bunty, the police suspect, believed they would depose against him in court. The police, meanwhile, have stepped on the gas to trace other members of the biker gang still absconding. The postmortem of Bunty and Rajesh was conducted at AIIMS on Tuesday after their family members identified the bodies. Though Bunty’s family members had yesterday said they would not identify him since they had nothing to do with Bunty once he began his criminal career, DCP (South) H G S Dhaliwal said, “The postmortem was conducted after their bodies were identified. They had suffered gunshots, as shown in the postmortem reports.”
He added that the two were cremated as well. Bunty’s father Babu Lal Rajora had earlier said that Bunty was a criminal and that the family would not claim the body of a criminal.