Five days after the killing of Hindu Mahasabha leader Ranjeet Bachchan, the Uttar Pradesh police and the special task force (STF) nabbed the shooter involved in the murder from Mumbai.
The police got the leads to Mumbai after going through the mobile phones of the relatives and the call detail records (CDR) of the suspect. The shooter Jitendra had taken a train to Mumbai soon after the crime.
The Lucknow police on Thursday held a press conference and claimed that Bachchan was shot dead at the behest of his second wife Smriti Srivastava and her paramour-Devendra. The duo and their two accomplices have been arrested.
Cops claimed that Bachchan’s second wife Smriti Srivastava wanted to marry Devendra, but Bachchan had strongly opposed it. He was allegedly not ready to give divorce to Smriti and a suit in this regard was pending at the court since 2016.
Bachchan (40), the leader of the right-wing Hindu outfit was shot dead on Sunday while he was out on a morning walk with his first wife Kalindi Sharma, barely a couple of kilometres away from the high-security Uttar Pradesh legislature complex in the heart of the state capital.
He was also accused of raping his sister-in-law and had been absconding in the police record when he was killed.
Bachchan was earlier associated with the Samajwadi Party, which had allotted him a government property in a plush apartment in Lucknow.
After the SP’s electoral loss in 2017, Bachchan and Kalindi snapped ties with it, and joined hands with the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, for which Bachchan served as acting state president for a while.
By the end of 2017, he set-up his own outfit Vishwa Hindu Mahasabha, his acquaintances say.
