Punjab: About three years ago, four shooters barged into a kabaddi match in Jalandhar’s Mallian Khurd village and shot international kabaddi player Sandeep Nangal Ambian multiple times from close range. The player, who captained both India and the United Kingdom, died from the first shot itself. The bullet hit the middle of his forehead. The shooters, named Harjeet Singh alias Harry Maur, Ravinder Singh, Puneet Lakhanpal alias Sharma and Narinder Kumar Lali, fled the scene in a white car without being challenged. Although within a week of the incident, Delhi and Punjab police arrested some of the main conspirators of the Kaushal Chaudhary/Lucky Patial gang and revealed the names of their international handlers, it still took the police nearly three years to nab the four shooters. The Counter Intelligence Unit of Punjab Police arrested six people in an operation in Jandiala, Amritsar. These included Puneet and Lali. Harry Maur and Ravinder Singh were arrested by the Delhi Special Cell in September 2023, about 18 months after the crime. Punjab police recovered the car and weapons used in the murder in February 2024, nearly two years after the murder.
And now, the two remaining shooters have been caught. This arrest is also important because these killers were roaming freely for a long time, committing murders and extorting money arbitrarily. This happened when the police of Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi were searching for them. And also, despite a fight between the shooters soon after Ambiyan’s murder, one of them, Maur, shot Puneet in the leg, and he still walks with a limp. Ambiyan was killed on March 14, 2022, in the transition week of power change in Punjab. The Aam Aadmi Party had ousted the Congress from power by winning 92 out of 117 seats in the assembly elections. The murder shook the state and also exposed the involvement of gangsters in organizing kabaddi matches. Police claimed soon after the murder that it was the result of a gang war to control a money-making kabaddi league with a network spread across Canada, UK, New Zealand, Malaysia and Italy. Punjab was the main operation ground. Ambien was said to be running a league backed by gangster Jaggu Bhagwanpuria, while the Bambiha gang wanted him to work for their league.
Soon after the murder, Punjab police registered a case against Snover Dhillon, a radio journalist in Brampton, Canada, and Surjit Singh Chattha from England, who ran his own kabaddi federation. Police also named gangster Sukhwinder Singh alias Sukha Duneke and Jagjit Singh alias Gandhi from Malaysia as conspirators. Chattha was the only person arrested by Jalandhar police last year, while Sukha Duneke was killed by rival gangsters in Canada on September 20, 2023. The police had claimed that Snover Dhillon ran the “National Kabaddi Federation of Ontario” but the key players were associated with the “Major League Kabaddi” managed by Sandeep Ambien. Dhillon had tried to lure Ambien with a huge sum of money and later even threatened him, but Ambien refused to join him. Police sources said that though it took a long time to nab the two absconding shooters, the important thing is that they have been nabbed at a crucial time when they had assembled in Punjab to “carry out some target killings at the behest of their foreign handler”. A senior police officer involved in their arrest said, “We are questioning them about where they were hiding and how they carried out their operations. We have prevented a horrific crime spree in the region with their arrest.”
