A tailor by day and killer by night; Bhopal man murdered 33

Bhopal, Sept 12: During the day Adesh Khamra stitched clothes, hunched over his sewing machine in a small shop on the fringes of Bhopal. In the night, as he tossed in bed, consumed by visions of deadly crimes that he wanted to commit, he perhaps saw himself switching the needle for an axe, the thread into a hangman's noose.

Then the killings started. Sometime around 2010. The first one in Amravati, the other in Nashik. Soon, bodies started popping up everywhere in MP, some even in Maharashtra, UP and Bihar. There was one element that connected the murders. All the victims were truck drivers and their helpers. But no one thought the quiet, affable tailor from Mandideep could have been behind the brutality.

Last week, when the local police finally nabbed Khamra, they were stunned he admitted to 30 killings. On Tuesday, he said he had killed three more. At 33 serial strikes, that would make him one of India's deadliest killers, behind the likes of Raman Raghav, who was charged with slaughtering 42, Surendra Koli and the Stoneman of Kolkata. Khamra, who was arrested from the jungles of Sultanpur in UP by a daring woman cop after a three-day chase last week, "was admitting to murders so rapidly" that the raiding team said it was struggling to keep up with the flow of information.

‘He killed drivers to give them salvation’

It was Bhopal city SP Bittu Sharma — a taekwondo black belt and Asian Games bronze medalist in judo — who took Khamra down at gunpoint in the dead of the night. Neither she nor SP Lodha Rahul Kumar, who headed investigations into two recent murders of truckers, had any clue then that they possibly had one of India’s most notorious serial killers in their custody. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime case,” said Lodha.

Co-accused Jaykaran has told police that whenever they asked him why he killed the drivers, he would laugh and say he is granting them salvation. “They lead hard lives,” he would laugh. “I am giving them mukti, freeing them from pain.”

Friends and relatives said it was unbelievable that they had lived next to a monster all this while. “He was a quiet man, well behaved. There is no way anyone will accept he has the blood of so many on his hands,” said a neighbor.

Bhopal DIG Dharmendra Choudhary said Khamra, 48 now, could put up a disarming show of warmth and friendliness. He used this to befriend truckers and trap them. While his men looted the cargo, he would strangle the drivers with a length of rope. Occasionally, he used poison to silence his victims.

The modus operandi was chillingly effective — ensnare truckers over drinks, drug them, murder them, strip them of every bit of clothing that could lead to their identification, and dump bodies under culverts or on hilly roads.

This way, bodies would turn up in states ranging from MP to Maharashtra, UP, Bihar and Jharkhand, with police struggling to join the dots. “That is what makes this gang so deadly. We don’t know how many more cold cases will be traced back to them,” said an officer interrogating Khamra.

Talking to Khamra is quite unsettling, police officers involved in the probe said. He shows no remorse. “And he remembers every little detail about everyone he has killed. The victim’s last meal, where they ate, what they wore, where and how he was killed and where exactly the body was dumped. The details are bloodcurdling. In postmortem reports, the injuries were exactly where he had dealt the blows,” added a police officer.

For police, there were more startling disclosures in store. Khamra was most likely influenced by a dreaded killer he called uncle, a man whose name was Ashok Khamra. Ashok himself had admitted to 100 trucker murders when he was arrested in 2010, police said. Ashok drugged his police escort while being brought to Bhopal by train and escaped. He hasn’t been seen since.

In the close-knit Khamra community — a group of hard working, educated people whose forefathers came as refugees from Pakistan — Ashok’s notoriety is a matter of shame. So is Khamra’s now.

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Israeli forces invade southwestern Syria, set up checkpoint in Quneitra

News Network

November 24,2025

Israeli forces have pushed over the Syrian frontier, erecting a checkpoint and stopping vehicles in the southwestern city of Quneitra, in yet another breach of the Arab country’s sovereignty.

The violation took place on Sunday, when the troops made their way across the border, setting up the outpost near the Ain al-Bayda junction in northern Quneitra, Syrian outlets reported.

According to the al-Ikhbariya paper, an Israeli detachment positioned itself at the junction, halting cars and conducting searches.

The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that three Israeli military vehicles then moved further into the northern countryside, deploying between the town of Jubata al-Khashab and the villages of Ofaniya and Ain al-Bayda. The agency added that a separate Israeli unit mounted a new incursion in the central region, approaching the villages of Umm Batina and al-Ajraf.

Residents said such activities have surged in recent months, pointing to Israeli advances onto farmland, leveling of extensive forested areas, arrests, and spread of mobile checkpoints.

The Israeli regime began markedly increasing its military aggression against Syria last year.

The escalation coincided with increasingly ferocious onslaughts throughout the country by the so-called Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Takfiri terrorist group, which the government of President Bashar al-Assad had confined to northwestern Syria. The HTS, however, managed to overthrow the government as the Israeli attacks would pummel the country’s civilian and defensive infrastructure.

Various reports have shown that, during the escalation, the regime conducted more than 1,000 airstrikes on the Syrian territory and over 400 ground raids into the south.

Following the collapse of the Assad government, Tel Aviv also widened its grip over the occupied Golan Heights by taking control of a demilitarized buffer zone, in defiance of a 1974 Disengagement Agreement. Earlier this month, senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the buffer zone, prompting expressions of alarm on the part of the United Nations.

The United States, the regime’s biggest ally, has, meanwhile, been fraternizing the HTS head Abu Mohammed al-Jolani amid the widely reported prospect of rapprochement with Tel Aviv.

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