Mumbai: Six months after his father Baba Siddique’s murder, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) neta and ex-MLA Zeeshan Siddique on Monday lodged a complaint with police, saying he received death threats via emails, claiming to be from ‘D Company,’ demanding protection money of Rs 10 crore. What baffled the security agencies was the fact that the threat sender dismissed the police investigations in Baba Siddique’s murder and denied Lawrence Bishnoi’s involvement in it.
Siddique told TOI that he received three threat mails on his official email address. At the time of going to press, he was busy recording his statement with police at his Bandra home. “What happened to your father will happen to you,” the threat mail stated, prompting Zeeshan to lodge a police complaint.
A top police officer said, “We have received the complaint and police are conducting further inquiries.” Prima facie, a crime branch official suspects it could be a mischief, and the caller may be trying to extort money or mislead the investigation from Lawrence to ‘D Company.’
“I normally don’t check my official email on a daily basis, but on Monday, when I checked, I found three emails one after another. The first email, which was written in broken English, claimed to be from ‘D Company’ and stated that I would meet the same fate as my father. The mail asked me to arrange Rs 10 crore in two days and threatened me against going to police. The second and third emails were reminders,” said Zeeshan. The police formed a team of cyber experts who are trying to trace the IP address of the sender. Prima facie, the sender’s email address reflects his name as Mohammed Dilshad, and his profile picture has a logo of a gun and 5 to 6 bullets. Police suspect the accused may have used a proxy server or email spoofing, which would display a fraudulent sender address. Zeeshan has raised a red flag as the threat came just two days after a city court allowed his mother’s intervention in the proceedings of his father’s murder. Baba Siddique, 66, was fatally shot by three assailants outside Zeeshan’s office in Bandra (East) on the night of Oct 12, 2024.