LAHORE: Police claimed on Saturday to have killed Dera Ghazi Khan’s Ladi gang ringleader and his accomplice in a joint operation launched by the district police and the Counter Terrorism Department, Punjab.

The operation was carried out at Dera Sufaido in the jurisdiction of DG Khan’s Kot Mubarak police station after the gangsters recently amputated arms and other body parts of Ramzan, a resident of the same district, and killed him. They also filmed the incident which they made viral on social media.

Prime Minister Imran Khan took notice of the incident and directed Chief Minister Sardar Usman Buzdar and the provincial police to eliminate the gang of criminals. The gangsters were involved in heinous crimes.

A police official said ringleader Khuda Bakhsh and his accomplices had disappeared in some inaccessible hilly areas of DG Khan after killing Ramzan. As the police teams had been working on the assignment, they traced the hideouts of the criminals using human intelligence and finally killed Khuda Bakhsh and his accomplice Ismail.

He said the DG Khan police had killed 13 members of the gang since 2002 when it was formed to extort money from local cement factories.

The gang was backed by heads of some local tribes who had strong political background in DG Khan, the police official said.

Later, the Ladi gang expanded criminal activities, kidnapped and killed many people, he said, adding that they were also supported by terrorist groups including the Balochistan Liberation Army and the Balochistan Republican Army.

Out of the 13 members of the gang, 10 were killed during the last eight months in multiple operations launched by the DG Khan police, he said. They included Ghulam Shabbir, Sajjad, Akhtar, Shabbir, Ayoub and Noor Mohammad.

The criminals had attacked police 23 times during that period and injured many officials, he said. The DG Khan police, he said, also arrested more than 30 facilitators of the gang. The official said the Ladi gang drove away with an armored personnel carrier of the DG Khan police to use it for criminal activities which was later taken back by police in an operation.

Published in Dawn, July 18th, 2021