Jailed Indian don behind Nepal media tycoon’s murder: police

KATHMANDU - Nepal’s controversial media tycoon Jamim Shah was gunned down in Kathmandu this month on jailed Indian ganglord Babloo Srivastav’s orders, police said Monday.

Jamim Shah, the 43-year-old owner of Nepal’s first private television station Channel Nepal had his death plotted nearly two months ago by Babloo, now doing time in India’s Bareilly jail while the actual planning was done by an Uttar Pradesh gangster of Nepali origin.

Dipak Shahi alias Babloo Singh, a resident of Badaun in Uttar Pradesh — an Indian of Nepali origin — who held both Indian and Nepali identity cards, had masterminded the meticulously plotted execution that also involved a Nepali sub-inspector of police and nearly a dozen others, Metropolitan Police chief Mohan Khadka said Monday at a press conference, nine days after the shocking broad daylight murder.

The policeman, Prakash Chhetri, became acquainted with Shahi in India when he went to attend his aunt’s wedding and was drawn into the plot to kill Shah, alleged to be one of the kingpins of a flourishing Indian fake curreny racket in Nepal and with links to underworld don Dawood Ibrahim.

Chhetri has been arrested while Shahi and the two men actually involved in the shootout are still at large and believed to have fled to India.

Police said Babloo employed two professional shooters to carry out the killing on one of the busiest roads of the Nepali capital.

While the identity of one is still unknown, the second is Mohammad Bakher Said. Said, police say, was also involved in the killing of another fake currency runner and Dawood aide Shaukat Beg in Nepal’s Butwal town recently.

At least six other Nepalis were involved in giving shelter to the three men, providing a motorcycle for the killing and taking care of other logistics.

Police also said they had traced a payment to a man in his account with the State Bank of India in Varanasi.

However, police said investigations were still on into the motive for the killing.

While Nepal remains silent about Jamim Shah’s past, there have been several allegations in the past that he was also an operative of Pakistan’s ISI and had provided logistical support to the five Pakistani terrorists who hijacked an Indian Airlines aircraft in 1999.