An old photo ID from a kung fu academy in Shamli, his father’s name on Aadhaar: What led police to Salim Wastik

Salim Khan alias Salim Ahmed alias Salim Wastik was arrested by Delhi Police over the weekend for a murder he had committed in 1995. Five years after that crime, he had jumped bail and vanished.

He had since managed to convince the world that he was dead. And had given himself a new life as an outspoken “ex-Muslim” on the Internet.

Last month, two men lost their lives in the wake of his transformation – allegedly blinded by rage at his anti-Islam views, they attacked him with a razor. The UP Police said they were “fanatics”, and within days of their attack on Salim Wastik, shot both men dead in separate night-time encounters.

For the police officers who connected the dots from Salim Khan to Salim Ahmed to Salim Wastik – from the man who was sentenced to life in prison in 1997 for the kidnap and murder of a 13-year-old schoolboy in Northeast Delhi’s Gokalpuri to the “ex-Muslim” on YouTube – the first clue came from his Aadhaar.

When Salim got himself an Aadhaar in 2015, he had been “dead” to the world for 15 years. But he retained his father’s name, Noor Hasan, on the document.

As the police dug deeper, they got other details that helped to finally zero in on their man in Loni, Ghaziabad on Friday (April 24): his wife’s name, Afsana, for example.

And his photo on the identity card of a centre teaching Shaolin kung fu, the largest and best known style of the Chinese martial art, in Shamli, then a part of Western UP’s Muzaffarnagar district.

Samil’s photo on the identity card of a centre teaching Shaolin kung fu, the largest and best known style of the Chinese martial art, in Shamli. (Express Photo)

Police checked all these details against the court records from the late 1990s, and found a match. Salim had appealed his 1997 conviction and had jumped bail in 2000 while the appeal was still pending. His conviction was upheld in 2011.

Armed presumably with the brown belt that he earned at the Shamli kung fu academy, Salim got himself a job in a school in Delhi. “Investigators found that he worked as a physical trainer at a school in Paharganj, where the 13-year-old boy, the son of a businessman, studied. He planned to kidnap the boy to demand ransom from the boy’s father,” a police officer said.

According to police, after jumping bail in 2000, Salim spent about a decade in Haryana working as an iron almirah manufacturer before moving to Loni in Ghaziabad.

There, under the name Salim Ahmed, he ran a shop selling women’s garments and accessories. He also brought his wife and daughter from Shamli to live with him.

Around five years ago, he started a YouTube channel, gaining attention for controversial views on Islam and building a niche audience as an “ex-Muslim”. He again changed his name – this time to Salim Wastik – and later distanced himself from his family, police said.

The Delhi Police Crime Branch reopened the 1995 kidnapping-murder case earlier this year as part of its review of cold cases. A probe by a team led by Inspector Robin Tyagi, under ACP Sanjay Kumar Nagpal and supervised by DCP Sanjeev Yadav, identified Salim Wastik as the fugitive.

“We never imagined he was the same man when he became popular on YouTube, even after he was attacked by two men in Loni. We only had a decades-old martial arts ID card of Salim Khan in court records,” said an officer involved in the arrest.

Last year, police had visited Nannupura Mohalla, Salim’s hometown in Shamli. “His relatives claimed he had died. A few months ago, we received a tip-off linking Salim Wastik to Salim Khan. It was initially dismissed,” the officer said.

But the police did notice that while in his old photo he was slimmer, his father’s name (Noor Hasan), and wife’s name (Afsana) were the same. “And his YouTube sessions mentioning kung fu raised suspicions,” the officer added.

Police said they tracked Salim Wastik, and matched his fingerprints with Salim Khan’s bail records, leading to his arrest.

Asked how he managed to give police the slip even though Gokalpuri is located on the Delhi-Ghaziabad border near Loni, a senior Delhi Police officer said interstate information-sharing networks like CCTNS (Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems) or other technical tools were not available at the time.

“The police had to rely on human intelligence networks. In this case, Salim, a resident of Shamli, moved to Haryana for 10 years and then, in 2011, came to Loni, where he lived under a changed identity,” the officer said.

The Ghaziabad Police, on their part, said they had been unaware of Salim Wastik’s involvement in the 1995 kidnapping-murder case in Delhi.

Deputy Commissioner of Police, Ghaziabad (Rural), Surender Nath Tiwari told The Indian Express, “We were not aware that he was involved in a murder case in Delhi… On Friday, the Delhi Police told us that they would detain Wastik for questioning. Later, we were informed that he was arrested.”