Shabana in Godmother

Ahmedabad, May 20: Unidentified assailants shot dead ‘Godmother’ Santokben Jadeja’s daughter-in-law Rekha at her Rajkot residence early this morning in an attack that police said could have been plotted for revenge.

The killers, suspected to be members of a rival gang active in Porbandar, pumped seven bullets into her chest as the 32-year-old was reading a newspaper. She died on the spot.

The killers had vanished by the time Santokben ? the feared widow of a gang leader and the subject of a film, the Shabana Azmi-starrer Godmother ? came out on hearing the shots.

Police sources said they suspected the involvement of a rival gang and relatives of former Porbandar BJP councillor Keshu Odedra, who was allegedly killed by Rekha’s husband Kandal and his younger brother Karan last year.

The Ahmedabad crime branch had arrested the two as they were escaping to Mumbai by road. Kandal, the eldest of Santokben’s four sons, is in Sabarmati Central Jail while Karan is in a prison in Rajkot.

Rajkot police commissioner K. Nityanandam said though nobody saw the assailants, it appears there was more than one as the cartridges found from the spot showed two different weapons had been used.

Sources said Rekha, who managed the family business in Santokben’s absence, was an easy target. She used to walk in the sprawling compound of their upmarket Kalvad Road house and then read newspapers.

But police officials said the attackers, who struck around 6.30, would have killed Santokben ? whose name once spelt terror in the Porbandar-Rajkot region ? or any other family member if they had come out as they wanted to avenge the BJP councillor’s murder.

Santokben, a former MLA, had moved to Rajkot after her husband Samar Jadeja, a gang leader in Porbandar, was killed by rivals in 1986. She then took charge, heading a group of over a hundred hardcore criminals.

Her gang was involved in murder and kidnappings and also took cuts for every contract made in Porbandar city, the birthplace of the Father of the Nation. Over 500 cases were registered against her gang.

But there is no case against her in Rajkot, said the city’s police chief.