A chase by the Punjab Police first pushed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi into Jaipur, where he graduated from campus violence to the liquor trade. An extortion attempt on a leading Rajasthan doctor then landed him in a Jodhpur prison, where he met members of the now Bishnoi clan. A murder case later brought him to a Jodhpur court on January 4, 2018, the same day Bollywood actor Salman Khan was in the court complex for a hearing in the blackbuck poaching case.
Over the last decade, he has repeatedly threatened to kill the actor, as the blackbuck is considered sacred by the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan. In recent years, police have stepped up Khan’s security and arrested Bishnoi’s aides for arranging weapons and conducting a recce outside the actor’s Bandra residence. His confession details at least two revenge murders during this time. This is what the police have documented of that day, based on Bishnoi’s confession: “Lawrence Bishnoi was arrested in the murder case of Vashudev Irani and brought to Jodhpur where he was produced in court.
Because his murder drew the gangster deeper into Rajasthan, where he met members of the Bishnoi community and first heard about the 1998 blackbuck case, amandeep also matters to the Bishnoi-Khan story. Because they take him deeper to Rajasthan, where he meets the Bishnoi community members, both murders are significant. Because salman Khan had hunted blackbuck and was not receiving punishment from the court, which greatly hurt the Bishnoi community.”, while coming out of the court Salman Khan had also arrived for a hearing in the same court whom the accused Lawrence Bishnoi threatened to kill.
When Khan allegedly hunted the blackbuck near Jodhpur between September 26 and October 2, 1998, Bishnoi was just seven years old, living in a village in Punjab’s Fazilka district. In 2024, the Bishnoi gang also killed Nationalist Congress Party leader Baba Siddique, allegedly over his closeness to Khan and to establish the gang’s supremacy in Mumbai. Sometime in 2014, after Amandeep was murdered by the liquor mafia in Rajasthan, Bishnoi expanded his gang into the state and vowed revenge. It added that Bishnoi’s three aides fired at the doctor and demanded a ransom of ₹ 1 crore.
“ ….After this at the end of the year 2017, the accused Lawrence Bishnoi on the saying of his two associates Vishnu and Harender who were residents of Jodhpur, made a plan to demand ransom from a doctor(name withheld) who has chain of several hospitals (name withheld) in Rajasthan, and the owner of a travel Company of Jodhpur,” the confession said.
The confession does not explain how Bishnoi developed an interest in the Salman Khan case. However, police officers who have questioned him in the past suspect that conversations with community members inside the Jodhpur prison may have prompted him to take up what he saw as the cause of the Bishnoi people. Bishnoi had earlier spent time in prisons across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan during his nearly decade-long criminal career (2008-2017), but this stint would prove particularly significant.According to his confession, it was in this prison that he shared cells mostly with members of the Bishnoi community who were lodged there in smuggling cases. His stay in the prison around August 2017 also coincided with the final stages of the proceedings in Khan’s case at the local court.
