'YouTuber signed for Bollywood biopic': How Salim Khan became 'ex-Muslim Salim Wastik'; arrested after 31 years

NEW DELHI: Delhi Police’s crime branch has arrested a prominent YouTuber for murdering a 13-year-old boy after kidnapping him for ransom 31 years ago. On the run after jumping bail in 2000, Salim Khan became Salim Wastik and courted fame and danger with his views on Islam and national security on YouTube. Police said Salim was even signed for a Bollywood biopic recently.

It was fame that landed ‘exMuslim Salim Wastik’ in the police net: a head constable supplied the valuable tip and a team tracking parole-jumbers put the pieces together with some old photos of Salim’s.

The YouTuber had a brush with police this Feb when he was stabbed by two brothers at his office in Loni, Ghaziabad. Salim suffered multiple wounds to the neck and abdomen. Police identified the attackers as “fanatics” outraged by his religious commentary. In the following weeks, both attackers were gunned down in encounters, while UP police provided Salim with personal security officers.

By the time Salim recovered from his injuries, the crime branch had connected the dots and moved in to arrest him, ending a chase that began 26 years ago.

It was on Jan 20, 1995 that Sandeep Bansal, the son of a cement businessman in the city, disappeared on his way to second-shift classes at Ramjas School in Daryaganj.

Murder accused vanished after getting interim bail

The following day, his father, Sita Ram, received ransom demands totaling Rs 30,000, with instructions to leave the cash on a bus headed towards Baghpat. The family complied, but the boy never returned.

Police suspicion fell on Salim Khan, a martial arts instructor at Sandeep’s school. After a neighbour reported seeing the child leave in a rickshaw with a tall male known as ‘Masterji’, police confronted Salim. Under interrogation, Salim confessed and led investigators to a drain in Mustafabad, where Sandeep’s body was recovered. His accomplice, a man named Anil, later surrendered and was found to have planned the kidnapping for money. In 1997, both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The trajectory of the case shifted in 2000 when Delhi High Court granted Salim interim bail. He vanished. To deceive law enforcement, he reportedly declared himself dead and assumed the new identity of ‘Salim Ahmed’, eventually adopting the moniker ‘Salim Wastik’.

For the next two decades, he evaded capture by moving across Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, working as an almirah maker and later opening a ladies’ clothing shop in Loni, Ghaziabad. Once he became a YouTuber with a considerable following, he came on the police radar.

“A team led by inspector Robin Tyagi and supervised by ACP Sanjay Kumar Nagpal was tasked with tracking long-term parole jumpers. Acting on secret information provided by head constable Mintu Yadav, the team utilised fingerprints and old photographs to confirm that the famous ‘Ex-Muslim Salim Wastik’ was, in fact, the fugitive Salim Khan,” said DCP (crime) Sanjeev Yadav.

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