Kanpur: Gangster Vikas Dubey was killed in an encounter after a road accident on Friday morning while being taken to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh from Madhya Pradesh -- where he was arrested yesterday - say the police. Vikas Dubey snatched the gun of a policeman and tried to run but was surrounded, the police said, asserting that they had tried to get him to surrender.
Just an hour short of Kanpur, the car in which Vikas Dubey was being taken - one of three in the police convoy -- overturned on the rain-slicked highway and he tried to escape, the police said. He was shot dead, like many of his accomplices who, according to the police, had also tried to escape from custody.
"The car overturned and policemen and the accused were injured. Then Vikas Dubey grabbed a gun from an injured policeman and ran. The police team caught up and surrounded him and tried to get him to surrender, but he refused and started firing. The police had to fire back in self-defence," the Kanpur police said in a statement.
"Vikas Dubey was injured and taken to hospital. He died during treatment," said the statement.
On the run since he organized the massacre of policemen at his village in Kanpur last Friday, Vikas Dubey was arrested dramatically yesterday at the famous Mahakal temple in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh. He was spotted by temple security guards when he bought prasad and entered the temple. When he was confronted by the guards, he lashed out and was taken to the police. "Main Vikas Dubey hoon, Kanpur wala! (I am Vikas Dubey, the Kanpur guy)," he burst out, held by several Madhya Pradesh policemen.
The manner of his arrest, at a very public place and far from UP, led to speculation that he had decided to turn himself in at a time and place of his choosing.
Evading UP policemen on his trail for five days, Dubey had driven from Kanpur to Faridabad in Haryana, where he escaped from a hotel just before the police arrived. He then drove to Kota in Rajasthan and finally to Madhya Pradesh in a 1,500-km journey.
Senior UP police officer Mohit Agarwal had said: "We had caught many of his associates and a few were killed. So definitely he was trying to save his life and on the run."
A petition filed in the Supreme Court last night had asked for security for the gangster and a CBI investigation into a series of encounter killings.
Five of Dubey's aides had been killed in the past few days.
Hours before Dubey's arrest, two of his accomplices had been shot dead by Uttar Pradesh police in separate encounters.
One of them, Prabhat, was arrested on Wednesday from the Faridabad hotel where Dubey had been sighted. On the way to UP, he allegedly snatched a pistol from a policeman trying to fix a flat tyre and tried to run away when he was shot, the police said.
Dubey's closest aide Aman Dubey was shot dead after he was chased down by the police to a village on Wednesday.