Gulshan Kumar shot dead, scare in filmdom

As he was returning to his car after finishing his prayers, two pistol-wielding youth strode towards him, abused him and placed a gun on his temple and shot him at point blank range. In filmy style the assailants asked Kumar if had finished his pooja and then said: “Bahut pooja kiya, baaki upar kar le.” Kumar dropped the plate with the prayer items as he was hit by the first bullet.

Even as Kumar got up and tried to find a place to hide, they pumped 17 bullets into him. Kumar staggered a few steps before dropping dead.Kumar’s driver Roop Chand who was waiting near his maroon Maruti 1000 then hurled a `kalash’ at one of the assailants. They fired at him hitting him in the leg. They then fired a flurry of shots and made their way through the narrow bylanes of the slum.

In the melee of flying bullets, three persons namely, Madan Sharma, a bystander, Madhukar Kavankar, an idol-maker whose shed was near Kumar’s car and a 17-year-old resident of the hutment were injured.The duo and their accomplice, who was waiting nearby, then boarded a taxi (MMO-891) and drove away at gunpoint. They abandoned the taxi at a nearby signal.

The assailants seemed to have carefully studied the religious-minded music baron’s daily routine, selecting his brief morning prayer session to target him. Kumar’s sub-machine gun-wielding bodyguard Nirankar Dev Sharma – provided to him by former UP CM Kalyan Singh two years ago – had reportedly taken ill a few days ago and did not accompany the producer this morning.

That was when the assassins struck.“I was sitting outside my house clipping my nails. I saw Kumar clad in a silk pyjama-kurta with a pooja plate in his hand walking towards his car. Just as he was about to board his car, one of the assailants sporting long hair planted a gun to his temple and pulled the trigger. Kumar fell on the ground but was looking for a place to hide.

I thought of pulling him inside but my friend pulled me inside and shut the door,” a terrified Cheryl D’Souza, a resident, told Express Newsline.

D’Souza said that a staggering Kumar saw her door closed then went to her neighbour’s house to seek shelter but to his dismay found that no one was answering his repeated knocks. He then went to a toilet but the assailants followed and pumped more bullets into him. Police later confirmed Kumar received 16 bullets on the temple, cheek and mostly on his chest.

According to D’Souza, the assailants were in the age-group of 25-27 and of moderate build. She said while two of them had short hair, the main assailant sported long hair and was dressed in a yellow shirt and mehndi-coloured jeans. While the second was wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans, she could not recall how the third was dressed.

The long-haired youth, she said, was waiting near Kumar’s car parked outside Dhoop Chaon building while another was stationed across the road. The third accomplice waited in front of the adjacent La Theresse building.Another witness said that her son came out of the house thinking that some people from the neighbourhood were bursting crackers celebrating the fall of a wicket in the India-Sri Lanka match. As soon as he came out a bullet Gulshan brushed his right hand.

According to another witness, the police came to the spot 30 minutes after the shooting and took Kumar to Cooper Hospital where he was declared dead before admission. His body was later taken to J J Hospital for post-mortem.

PSI Anil P Walsade of D N Nagar said that two of the injured were admitted to Cooper Hospital while the third was at Bharati Aryogamandir Hospital. One Nine mm pistol, 16 cartridges and two empty magazines were recovered from the spot, he said.

The killing, coming as it did in the wake of a series of law-and-order problems in the city in the past weeks, was quickly condemned by Chief Minister Manohar Joshi while his deputy and Home Minister, Gopinath Munde, called for eliminating the role of black money in movies.

Munde said that the CID had been given the case and prima facie it was believed that the Abu Salem gang was involved. “Nobody has been arrested yet,” he said. The driver of the taxi in which the gangsters travelled had been interrogated by the police and based on his descriptions, sketches of the culprits made, he said.

Admitting that a large amount of black money was involved in the business of filmmaking, Munde said that in the backdrop of such cases, it was important to make provisions for financial institutions to finance films to stem out the scourge of black money in the film industry. “It is called the film industry, but it is hardly an industry in that sense,” he said.

Munde added that investigations into the murder would be carried out from all possible angles.

A visibly shattered singer Sonu Nigam, the male singer who has sung the most songs for Gulshan Kumar’s T-Series label, recalled the late producer as being in high spirits when he last met him a fortnight ago. “He was telling me that he was contemplating ending his four-year hibernation from the film industry and would start promoting more movies,” Nigam added.