The big question is why would Vikas Dubey want to flee, escape? Was he silenced? There are lots of unanswered questions. Vikas Dubey was a history-sheeter. With a crime record that would give Al Capone the dithers. The chap had 60 criminal cases registered in n his name before he capped it with the horrific murder of the eight cops. The 60 cases ranged from attempt to murder to murder, and loot and every other vile imaginable.

Legend is it that he shot dead an UP minister right inside a police station in full view of a crop of policemen! None of the police officers or the grunts in khaki could do a thing to him, lift a finger. They just stood and watched and later washed the spilled blood off the floor. It was a muggy day outside and Vikas Dubey in his prime, every politician’s ‘buddy-come-handy.’

Vikas Dubey, they say, has been appendage to Samajwadi Party, prop for Bahujan Samaj Party and the confederate of Bharatiya Janata Party. The story went that he commanded a 100-strong criminal gang, people who lived and ruled the roost in territory around his village. It was also said that Vikas Dubey played political parties like a fiddle by using the caste-card and a sort of gentle coercion that left people chilled.

It appears “booth management” was Vikas Dubey’s specialty. And his wife was major beneficiary. You see, nepotism is not a Bollywood phenomenon. The Kanpur police took Dubey’s wife and son into custody the day Dubey ‘surrendered” to the Madhya Pradesh police.

It was a Friday and it was on the previous Friday that Vikas Dubey and gang ambushed and killed the eight cops. The last chapter of Vikas Dubey’s life ran from ‘Friday-to- Friday.’ The trigger-happy UP cops got him 30 kilometres short of the “police station.” The sequence of events is suspicious. The police narrative is full of holes.

Vikas Dubey was being transported from Ujjain to Kanpur. The distance nearly 800 km. Dubey is in a police SUV, seated in the rear and sandwiched between two armed cops. The SUV turns turtle. The police later say four policemen and Dubey got injured. But the injured Dubey is the first one to “come to.” He grabs a cop’s “pistol” and “climbs” out of the SUV. The cops regain sense and clamber out to give chase. Dubey is “surrounded” and “challenged.” There is a firefight, and the don is shot.

The police “story” goes on that Vikas Dubey is taken to hospital where he’s declared “brought dead.” Just as the police hoped, wanted? There are too many holes in the police narrative. Several questions. One, why was Vikas Dubey not in handcuffs? A violent man with a mile-long list of crimes should have been in irons. Also, locals at the “accident” site say they didn’t “see” any vehicle “turn-turtle”, they only “heard gun shots.” Who is lying?

Also, lots of media were trailing the caravan of police vehicles taking Vikas Dubey, but the police had just before the “SUV turned turtle” put “a rope across the highway” and stopped the media cavalcade a couple of miles behind! If that does not raise suspicion, what will? The fact is, why would a man, who had given himself up to the police, try to “flee” the next morning?

The fact also remains that Vikas Dubey had given the police the slip in Uttar Pradesh, Haryana… He must have known of the “five encounter deaths” of his gang men. In all the five (now six) encounters, Yogi Adityanath’s police said the same thing and killed the same way: The accused “snatched gun and fired on police escort” before he was shot in the encounter. Kind of ham-handed! There’s no imagination, nothing to give every encounter its unique flavour.

The stories do speak of “police injuries” but they are carbon copies! More of the same. The day before Vikas Dubey met his fate decided for him by the powers that be in Lucknow, and exactly week after he murderously killed eight police officers in cold blood on the steps to his mansion, a leading publishing house commissioned the Vikas Dubey story to the author of a book on Dawood Ibrahim. Only it won’t be like Vikas Dubey would have told it. For dead men don’t tell tales! (IPA Service)