Hyderabad: Two gangsters and a policeman were killed in a fierce gunfight in Telangana’s Nalgonda district on Saturday.
Two police officers were also injured in the gun battle which occurred on Saturday morning near Janakipur village in Mothkur mandal of Nalgonda district, about 175 km from Hyderabad.
Two pistols and a carbine, which the gangsters had snatched from police, were recovered from the scene .
Sources in the police have now confirmed that the both the men were part of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), a banned Islamist student organisation.
The duo had earlier opened fire on the police while a police party was questioning them at Suryapet after deboarding them from a bus coming to Hyderabad from Vijayawada.
One of the suspects has been identified as Aizazuddin alias Rahul, who escaped from the Khandwa Jail in October 2013 along with 5 other people who are called the ‘Abu Faizal gang.’
The Abu Faizal gang consists of Mehboob, Aslam Khan, Amjad Khan, Zakir Hussain alias Sadiq, and Aizazuddin alias Rahul and Abu Faizal himself, who is their leader.
Members of the gang have been on the run for past eighteen months reportedly moving from Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra and then UP to AP and Telangana.
The two are suspected to have been involved in the murder of two Madhya Pradesh police ATS officials in 2010-11, a failed terror strike in two police stations in Pune and a terror strike in Chennai Central Railway station that caused one death in May 2014.
The suspects had carried out a bank robbery in Karimnagar (Telagana) and later financed the Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), another terror outfit in Burdwan. JMB was making crude bombs in Burdwan last October to carry out strikes in Bangladesh.
The police had launched a massive hunt for the duo in the district after the Suryapet incident and a police party reached Janakipur village in the early hours of Saturday after a tip off.
Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao hailed the policemen promised all help to the families of the deceased and the injured.
