On December 28 last year, Nepal Police’s Bara district officers discovered the bodies of two Indian nationals at a community forest in Sahajnath. The duo had been stabbed and their throats were slit.
Police identified the dead as Arun and Dipak Ram, and launched an investigation into the murder. The investigation would soon point towards the Middle-east, and south of the border in India.
Soon, Brij Kishore Giri was arrested on charge of orchestrating the murders. When Giri was cornered, he had tried to escape and when police opened fire, he was shot in the calf. Investigators had till then believed that the murders were about personal vendetta of some sort. But when Giri opened his mouth, even the police officers looking into the case were baffled.
Giri pointed his finger towards a man named Shamshul Hoda.
Forty-eight-year-old Hoda, a Nepali national from Kalaiya, Bara, is learnt to have been living in Dubai working for one of India’s most wanted gangsters Dawood Ibrahim for the last one year. Investigators say it is not clear whether he took direct orders from Dawood or not.
According to sources, Hoda headed to Dubai two years ago after his failed attempt to land a seat in Nepal’s Parliament. When elections took place in Nepal in November 2013, Hoda was a candidate for Sharat Singh Bhandari’s Rastriya Madhesh Samajwadi Party. Having earned some money in Malaysia, where he worked for a year, Hoda wanted to try his luck in politics.
But things did not quite work out the way he had thought. He was defeated in the election. “Hoda then tried to get into the real estate business, but failed there as well,” an investigator told OnlineKhabar.
He then decided to head to Dubai, where he had a Pakistani contact, Safi. Police say they are still not sure how Hoda made a contact in Dubai, but evidence suggest that he might have done so while working Malaysia.
Nepal Police’s Special Bureau chief DIG Bam Bahadur Bhandari says,”We believe that Hoda went to Malaysia to work with a gang there dealing with counterfeit Indian currency. We also have reasons to believe that he went to Dubai again to do the same.”
According to a bureau source, in March 2016, Hoda successfully pushed fake notes worth Rs 5 million into India through the Nepal border, and this helped him gain the trust of this gang members. Then it was time for the gang to assign Hoda a bigger job — to blow up trains in India.
Police sources say Hoda may have been involved in the November 2016 derailment of a passenger train in Kanpur in north India, which killed over 150 people. In December of the same year, Hoda is believed to have been assigned to carry out another derailment in Kanpur. But this time, he had limited success.
On December 28, the Ajmer–Sealdah Express, a scheduled train from Ajmer to Sealdah, derailed near Kanpur, India. But there were no causalities; 60 people were injured.
Giri was allegedly working under orders from Hoda to carry out attacks in India, and the two Indian nationals (the Rams) found dead in Bara were Giri’s foot soldiers, it has been learnt. Police say Hoda sent over Rs 9,00,000 to Giri to pay for his operations. It is still unclear whether the Rams were killed because of their failure to plan the December 28 derailment properly, but police believe they were murdered because they could not execute orders from Giri.
Meanwhile, Hoda felt insecure in Dubai as his foot soldiers failed him, and decided to come to Nepal to hide.
Little did he know that police in Nepal and India were already aware of his plans. The arrest of gang members in India, and Giri’s aides in Nepal had already told police everything about him. Giri landed safely in Kathmandu few days ago, and walked out hassle-free from the airport. But within a few hours, he was caught.
