On Thursday evening, four people stood in Mumbai’s Esplanade court and heard a magistrate give the police eleven more days with them. Kunal, 21, Sumit, 19, Radha, 23, and Babita, 23, will stay in police custody till October 26 for their alleged role in the October 18 firing at Tiger Shroff’s car in Juhu. It is a courtroom decision that quietly tells you the investigation thinks the shooters were not the most important people in this story.
How the Tiger Shroff firing case became a supply-chain story
The Tiger Shroff firing has stopped being a manhunt and become a supply-chain investigation. The police case, as argued in court and reported by Mid-Day and the Deccan Herald, now looks like a four-state assembly line. Kunal allegedly collected a pistol and 20 rounds of ammunition from Amritsar on the instructions of Anil Pandit, a suspected gangster believed to be operating from the United States and linked to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang. Sumit allegedly went with him. Kunal then persuaded Radha to carry the weapon to Mumbai, the pistol concealed in her bag, on a train from New Delhi on October 15. Both women arrived at Dadar on October 17 and checked into a hotel. A minor boy collected the bag near the hotel around 11 am, police claimed.
Read that sequence again and notice what it says about the operation. No smuggler with a car. No hidden compartment. Just two young women on a regular train, moving a gun roughly 1,400 kilometres in plain sight. Radha is from Sitapur, Babita from Azamgarh, both in Uttar Pradesh. Whether the allegations against them hold up in court is a separate matter, but the route the police describe is the reason this case keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. The gun arrived before the gunmen were ready.
A test shot nobody noticed
One detail from the investigation, reported by IANS, deserves more attention than it has got. The accused allegedly test-fired the pistol in their Andheri hotel room to make sure it worked before the attack, and one shot went into the bed. Nobody in the hotel raised an alarm.
Pause on that for a second. A live round discharged in a Mumbai hotel room, and the staff, the guests on the floor, the management, nobody flagged it. In a city that has spent two years on edge after the Salman Khan balcony firing and the Baba Siddique murder, a test shot went off indoors and the building carried on with its day. It is a small, unnerving fact about how much noise a city absorbs. Had someone called it in, the Juhu firing might never have happened.
The shooters fled toward Surat after the attack, boarded a Jaipur-bound train, and were intercepted at Kota railway station with the Rajasthan Police’s help, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said on October 19. On Wednesday, a Mumbai court remanded the three alleged shooters, Rehan, Ritik and Phool Singh, to police custody till October 31. The four new accused were detained on October 20 by the Delhi Police Special Cell and formally arrested by the Maharashtra Police’s Crime Investigation Department, taking the total to 10 arrests in five days.
What the police still have to prove
Here is the part that needs a caution label, and the defence lawyers made sure the court heard it. The defence, represented by Ajinkya Mirgul and Satyavrat Joshi, argued that the police had not established the connection between the four accused and the alleged weapons supply, and questioned whether there was enough evidence to implicate the two women beyond police suspicion. They asked for judicial custody instead.
Those arguments matter because custody till October 26 is not a conviction. It is the court saying the police get eleven days to turn claims into evidence: the pistol’s chain of custody, call records tying Kunal to Anil Pandit, the boy who collected the bag, and the money trail behind the Amritsar purchase. As Law Chakra noted in its report, all allegations remain untested and the accused are presumed innocent. The police told the court they need the time to trace the source of the weapons, among other things. That is a genuine gap: investigators have the alleged courier route mapped to the day, but the origin of the weapon itself is still an open question.
The Hindustan Times reported on Wednesday that investigators also found the alleged shooters had conducted reconnaissance at the homes of A-list actors before targeting Shroff. If that holds up, it means Juhu was a choice, not a coincidence. The Tiger Shroff firing case was never only about one actor’s car.
So the next hearing is the real test. When the four return to Esplanade court on October 26, the prosecution will have to show that eleven days of custody bought something concrete. The arrest count has been climbing fast, which looks like progress. It has been a bruising October for the city all round, from this firing to the Kurla high-rise blaze that hospitalised nine people. Whether it is progress or just volume depends on what the police bring back to that courtroom.