Duo, who posed as Lawrence Bishnoi aides, held for extortion attempt

Two men were arrested for allegedly making extortion calls to a Ludhiana-based businessman demanding Rs 10 lakh in the name of Lawrence Bishnoi and Goldy Brar, police said on Wednesday.

According to the police, the accused also threatened that he would meet the same fate as singer and politician Sidhu Moosewala, who was shot dead recently, if he did not oblige to the demand.

Accused Shakti Singh, 29, and Afzal Khan, 24, are residents of Bilaspur in Chattisgarh. Another person named Raja, a resident of Gopalganj in Bihar, is yet to be arrested, they said.

The businessman in his complaint alleged that he had been receiving threat calls from unknown international and Indian numbers since June 4, police said.

The callers identified themselves to be associated with the Lawrence Bishnoi-Goldy Brar gang and demanded Rs 10 lakh. They threatened to kill him, just like Moosewala, if he failed to pay the money, a senior police officer said.

The accused had allegedly also sent details of a bank account the businessman to transfer the money.

The Punjab Police had informed us that the location of the one of the phone numbers used in making the extortion calls was traced to Delhi and that the caller was changing his location frequently, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations) KPS Malhotra said.

During investigation, the caller was traced to Gurugram Sector-22 and nabbed along with another person and the phone was recovered. This phone was registered in Khan's name, the DCP said.

Singh revealed to the police that in January, he met the third accused Raja, who told him to arrange bank accounts and ATM cards, police said.

At Raja's behest, Singh arranged around 25 bank accounts and received Rs 25,000 for each of them, police said.

Moosewala, the singer-politician who had joined the Congress months before the 2022 state assembly polls, was shot dead in Punjab's Mansa district on May 29.

Last week, the Delhi Police had said that gangster Lawrence Bishnoi was the mastermind behind the murder. The Punjab Police took Bishnoi to the state from the national capital in the early hours of Wednesday to question him in the connection with the case.