The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad on Saturday arrested an aide of gangster Vikas Dubey and his driver from Thane, ANI reported. Dubey was arrested in connection with the murder of eight policemen in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur city and killed in police custody on Friday morning.

Dubey’s aide, identified as Guddan Trivedi, is also involved in the murder of Uttar Pradesh Minister Santosh Shukla in 2001, the special police force said. The Maharashtra ATS added that Trivedi and his driver Sonu Suresh Tiwari had been looking for a hideout in Mumbai and Thane. The two men were arrested from Kolshet in Thane. The Uttar Pradesh government had announced a reward for Trivedi’s arrest.

The Uttar Pradesh Police, meanwhile, said that they had arrested two men from Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior city on Friday for allegedly providing shelter to Dubey’s accomplices, PTI reported. The two men have been identified as Shashikant Pandey and Shivam Dubey.

Gwalior Additional Director General of Police Raja Babu Singh said the Uttar Pradesh police did not seek any any help from their colleagues in Madhya Pradesh in arresting Dubey’s aides.

Dubey was arrested in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain city on Thursday for the murder of eight policemen in an encounter in Kanpur’s Bikru village on July 3. Dubey had more than 60 criminal cases against him, including murder and extortion. He was arrested previously on many occasions but was not convicted in any of the cases. Five of his aides had been killed in the week between the shootout in Bikru and his arrest on Thursday.

The police claimed Dubey attempted to flee from their custody after snatching a gun on Friday morning, and was killed in retaliatory firing. The Uttar Pradesh Police maintained that they had tried to catch him alive. Dubey sustained four bullet injuries, three in the chest and one in the hand.

There are several unanswered questions about Dubey’s killing, including why he was not handcuffed when he was being taken to Kanpur and why the media was stopped two kilometres from the site of the incident.

The Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh Police had claimed that the car transporting Dubey overturned after the driver attempted to avoid a herd of cows and buffaloes but a video shared on social media also showed that Dubey was in a Tata Safari when the convoy went through a toll booth on its way to Kanpur and not a TUV 300 – the vehicle which was found overturned.

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Uttar Pradesh Police account of how Vikas Dubey was killed in custody raises serious questions