Aadesh Khamra was a tailor in Madhya Pradesh’s Mandideep, a small industrial town near Bhopal, where he lived with his wife and their five children. His father also lived with the family, but they did not get along well. In 2005, Khamra moved to Maharashtra as his relationship with his father soured further. With their marriage also not going well, he left behind his wife Sharda and the children too. Three years later, Khamra committed his first murder. The victim was a truck driver. Thus started a saga of murders that continued for 10 years, during which he is said to have killed at least 34 men — all truck drivers and cleaners. During interrogation after arrest, he told the police that the motive behind all the murders was robbery, as reported by Hindustan Times.
The 2008 murder was, however, not Khamra’s first criminal act. A year before, when he was in Maharashtra’s Bhandara, he had landed in police records for attacking a local goon with a brick after the latter apparently bullied him after refusing to pay for his tailoring services, according to Dinesh Kumar Kaushal, an additional superintendent of police (ASP) in Bhopal, as quoted by HT in the 2018 report. It was during his time behind the bars in that case when Khamra allegedly met a few criminals who would rob trucks on highways. According to the report, they formed a gang after their release from jail.
As per the report, Khamra developed connections with multiple gangs, and also got involved in contract killings. His typical modus operandi, however, involved engaging truck drivers in a conversation, offering them tea or lassi laced with sedatives, and then strangling them to death. Khamra would dispose of the victims’ bodies in gorges, forests, or leave them on secluded bridges. The bodies would often go undiscovered, and get severely decomposed by the time they were found.
The murder cases remained unsolved for a significant period as the bodies would mostly remain unidentified. When the MP Police arrested him in September 2018, they did not know they were going to crack so many unsolved murder cases.
How Khamra Formed A Gang And Carried Out Crimes
With roots in Pakistan’s Sialkot, Khamra had lost his mother at a young age, and did not have very good relations with his father. “My father-in-law was a very strict man. He wouldn’t hesitate from slapping Aadesh over trivial issues even after our marriage,” Khamra’s wife Sharda was quoted as saying in the HT report.
She also said that Khamra would often beat her over “petty domestic issues”, and that while he would initially come home at regular intervals after leaving Mandideep, the visits reduced over time.
According to the police, the gang he formed after getting out of jail following the Bhandara case would initially only rob the trucks but did not kill the drivers and cleaners. But he did not want to leave “anything to chance”, ASP Kaushal told HT, and convinced the gang members to kill the drivers. He carried out his first murder in 2008, and the victim was a driver whose truck they intercepted on the highway in Udaypura area, around 150 km from Bhopal. The police said the gang forced the truck to halt after trapping it between two cars.
The eight-member gang made around Rs 8 lakh after selling off the goods they robbed from the truck, and divided the loot among them. The case was solved only after his arrest in 2018.
The Killing Spree And Modus Operandi
Khamra had tasted blood. The second and third murders — the driver and the cleaner of a truck — took place in 2009, in Saoner near Pune. He was turning “brutal and cold-blooded”. Recounting the case, Bhopal SP Rahul Lodha told HT how an angry Khamra crushed his two victims under the truck’s wheels because “the leg of one of the two corpses kept in the truck was repeatedly interfering with the vehicle’s gearbox”.
Over the period of the next six years, the gang murdered 10 more truck drivers and cleaners. He had been arrested four times in the state between 2010 and 2014, and even spent nearly five years in jail, but would never get convicted due to lack of evidence.
After six years of killings, Khamra may have felt that working with a large gang meant a smaller share for each gang member and a high risk of getting caught. To avoid risk, he quit the gang and started working with just one accomplice. He needed that one person to drive the truck that had been robbed.
The two would target trucks returning to hometowns after dropping off goods. According to the police, he went for such trucks because return journeys were often unrewarding for truckers and hence they would agree to secretly transporting goods and make some quick bucks.
A 2022 Outlook report, which quoted Bhopal ACP Bittu Sharma, said Khamra and his accomplice would tell some cock and bull stories to truck drivers, showing urgency to reach home, and get into their vehicles. Once inside, they would befriend the drivers and their helpers and offer them sweets laced with sedatives.
According to media reports, while most of the murders were committed in MP and Maharashtra, some took place also in Chhattisgarh and even Uttar Pradesh.
Khamra allegedly murdered 23 men between 2014 and 2018, but was never caught. Among the victims was one that was a contract killing, which he carried out in 2017, according to the HT report. He was literally getting away with murders, becoming adept at leaving no trace. The Bhopal Police had in fact concluded that the contract murder was an accident.
In the end, however, it was the Bhopal Police only that caught him. SP (South) Rahul Lodha and his team that included woman officer Bittu Sharma, who was also an SP then, nabbed him at gunpoint. Quoting Sharma, the Outlook report said the police traced the cases of murders committed by Khamra between 2009 and 2018 to various states, and the remains of the bodies were found at the specified locations.
How His New Accomplice Got Him Arrested
Khamra ran out of luck in September 2018. He had allegedly carried out at least 12 kills that year between January and September.
In January 2018, Khamra had met one Jaikaran Prajapati at a dhaba in Bhopal. The 30-year-old had mostly done petty crimes until then but wanted to make more money and hence agreed to join Khamra, according to the 2018 HT report. Together, the gang killed 12 truck drivers and cleaners.
Prajapati told the police that Khamra would laugh whenever they asked why he killed the drivers. Media reports quoted him as saying that Khamra would say the drivers led “hard lives” and that he was “freeing them from pain” by giving them salvation.
Prajapati, however, reportedly wanted to lead his own gang and hence got together with some local criminals without Khamra’s knowledge. On August 13, 2018, Prajapati and his gang robbed a truck loaded with iron rod and killed the driver and the cleaner. They were, however, casual in disposing of the bodies, which were discovered by the police. The Bhopal Police nabbed Prajapati and his friends on September 4, 2018, according to media reports.
During investigation, Prajapati revealed details about Khamra and his location. Khamra was arrested on September 7.
Love For Son Led To Confession
As the police scanned Khamra’s past records, they discovered his role in the murders of eight drivers and cleaners. He confessed to other killings later.
“He was stubborn… He knew exactly how we were proceeding against him,” SP Lodha was quoted as saying in the HT report. He said Khamra would draw the investigating officers into lengthy conversations and force them to work harder on him.
The police were, however, able to discover his love for his eldest son Shubham. “…I drew him into an emotional conversation. I told him that his children were bearing the fruit of his actions and that Shubham had been involved in two serious accidents in the last year only because of his sins,” Lodha told HT, adding that this worked and he confessed to one murder.
According to the police, that was the only time when he displayed any sign of remorse.
As he started to tell the police about his other killings, the officers struggled to keep a count, but he showed no regrets. On the contrary, he would tell the officers that he was “no petty criminal” and hence should be treated with respect, the report quoted ASP Kaushal as saying.
Khamra’s only regret, the police said, was the “betrayal” by Prajapati, who he had caught by the collar during a brief encounter after their arrest.
Khamra Turned ‘Spiritual’ In Jail
Khamra is now an undertrial lodged in Bhopal’s Central Jail. He has been acquitted in one case due to lack of evidence, the 2022 Outlook report said. According to prison officials, he is often seen engrossed in religious scriptures, as reported by news agency PTI.
“In my observation, Adesh Khamra has become a person unaffected by any circumstances. No emotion, happiness, or sadness, affects him. He is educated and spends most of his time reading religious and motivational books…,” a senior official told PTI last year.
According to an Amar Ujala report, an MP court earlier this year convicted Khamra and his accomplices in a 2018 case and handed out a three-year jail sentence.
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