Police on Tuesday came out with two possible reasons for the Monday morning murder of medicine businessman Anil Agarwal.

With the men in uniform claiming to have detained a few suspects, senior superintendent of police (SSP) Manu Maharaaj, while maintaining that solving the case could take time, said the motive of the assailants was not loot or dacoity but only murder.

Agarwal, a medicine wholesaler, was gunned down by three men moments after he had opened his shop at Govind Mitra Road around 9.15am on Monday.

The police could not talk to the deceased's family on Tuesday. "There can be two possibilities. One is the angle of a debt. Initial investigations point out that Anil might have given a large sum of money to a person or persons as debt. He (Anil) was putting pressure on them to repay. The borrower might have decided not to pay up and planned the murder. The second possibility is a personal enmity angle. The man who killed Anil had no intention to loot his shop. The police have come to know that Anil's shop had Rs 5 lakh in cash when he was attacked. The attackers did not even try to search his shop and look for money or any other things. It has come to light that Anil had finished a deal related to a plot sometime back and that he also had an argument with some people," Maharaaj added.

"The CCTV footage shows images of three persons. The police, apart from checking the footage of the camera installed outside a girls' hostel in front of the shop, have found clips from other cameras belonging to the police as well. The men came on foot, shot the man and then fled away on foot. But somewhere in the middle, they had parked their bike and they used that after coming to a safe distance from the murder spot. This shows that the men had planned the whole operation carefully and might have rehearsed it too," he said.

A special investigation team (SIT) consisting of 20 cops, including some SHOs, has been formed to investigate the case.

"The police have detained 20 people on the basis of physical appearances of the men caught on the CCTV cameras. The boarders of the girls' hostel are also being quizzed as it is possible that someone might have seen the men," the SSP added.