Thousand gunshots rang in national capital this year
NEWDELHI: 2019 started with gunshots at midnight.
On a dance floor in a south Delhi farmhouse, a few minutes past 12am on January 1, a man fired four bullets in the air to celebrate the arrival of a new year. One of the bullets killed a woman. Around the same time, a 10-year-old boy was accidentally shot dead by his father in northeast Delhi’s New Usmanpur. Less than five kilometers away, in Welcome, exactly at midnight, a 13-year-old sustained a similar bullet injury.
These, it turns out, were not isolated cases. The first day of the year sparked off a circle of gun violence on Delhi’s streets that some former and current police officers are describing as “disturbing” and “scary”. Between January 1 and October 18, at least 1,017 shots were fired across the Capital in 310 incidents of shooting, an analysis by HT of all such incidents has shown. The bullets killed at least 102 people and left another 164 injured. These do not include cases where victims were held at gunpoint but no shots were fired.
What is worrying is that many of the shootings were reported from east, south, central and west Delhi, rather than just the city’s more notorious outer reaches.
When contacted, Delhi police commissioner Amulya Patnaik said that their data showed that the use of firearms in heinous cases declined this year. “We’ve launched a drive against arms smugglers. The crime branch and the special cell have been to
places outside Delhi and busted arms factories. Police have been proactive in dealing with suppliers. There is a quantum jump in seizures, and in the number of persons arrested in comparison to the previous years. The crimes have decreased in the last two years,” he contended.
A similar analysis by HT between May 17 and June 15 – at a time when reports of gun violence in the city appeared to have spiked -- had revealed that 220 shots were fired in the Capital, resulting in 16 deaths and 22 injuries. The shooting incidents have continued since then. In September, for example, at least 164 bullets were fired in 40 incidents.
The crimes occurred across the city — from Barakhamba Road in the heart of Lutyens’
Delhi to Sangam Vihar in the south, from Punjabi Bagh in the west to Rohini in outer Delhi. The 1,017 bullets fired were a result of gang wars, property disputes, robbery, enmity, and police shoot-outs. It also includes eight suicides, nine cases of celebratory firing, and seven incidents of accidental firing. Of the 310 cases of shooting, there were 37 cases in which police too fired at the fleeing criminals.
There is no ready comparative data from the previous years . But several senior offices, past and present, many of whom asked not to be named, said criminals showing no fear in shooting at public places, often in broad daylight is a new trend that does not speak well of how the city is policed
DRIVER LOST CONTROL OVER THE VEHICLE WHILE NEGOTIATING A SHARP CURVE