After firing at Bollywood celebrity Salman Khan’s residence in vengeance for the star’s slaughter of two antelopes, two members of a renowned criminal gang were taken into custody by Indian police on Tuesday.
The Bishnoi gang is a part of a larger religious sect situated in the desert that believes the species is the reincarnation of their master. They are suspected of multiple killings and extortion schemes.
Since 1998, Khan, 58, has been the target of the group due to his shooting of two blackbucks during a hunting excursion for fun.
The imprisoned gang boss Lawrence Bishnoi had previously threatened Khan’s life with an assassination.
Early on Sunday morning, two men on a motorbike fired shots at Khan’s first-floor residence in the posh Bandra neighborhood of Mumbai. They also fired multiple bullets into the air before escaping.
Because of threats to his life, Khan is constantly under the protection of armed police officers, and he was at home when the gunfire occurred.
Police told AFP that the two men, ages 21 and 24, had been taken into custody on Tuesday in the western state of Gujarat.
“We were able to locate the two accused near a temple,” Kutch district police officer Mahendra Bagaria said.
“One of our teams reached the temple and nabbed the accused.”
For twenty years, members of the Bishnoi community prosecuted Khan for the blackbuck shooting.
In 2018, Khan was found guilty of breaking the Wildlife Protection Act and given a five-year jail sentence by a local court.
However, the sentence was stayed pending an appeal only a few days after Khan’s jail sentence, which led Lawrence Bishnoi to issue a threat shortly after that his group would enforce the law on their own.
The leading member of the gang is suspected of planning multiple killings, including the 2022 assassination of well-known Indian musician Sidhu Moose Wala.
Since his breakthrough performance in the 1980s, Khan has starred in about 150 movies and TV series, and he continues to be one of Bollywood’s most lucrative characters.
However, controversy has long plagued his personal life.
In an alleged late-night hit-and-run in 2002, he allegedly ran over five persons who were sleeping on the pavement in a posh neighborhood of Mumbai, killing one of them.
He was exonerated, but in 2016 authorities contested his acquittal, and the matter is currently pending.
