A murder case later brought him to a Jodhpur court on January 4, 2018, the same day Bollywood actor Salman Khan was in the court complex for a hearing in the blackbuck poaching case. A chase by the Punjab Police first pushed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi into Jaipur, where he graduated from campus violence to the liquor trade. An extortion attempt on a leading Rajasthan doctor then landed him in a Jodhpur prison, where he met members of the now Bishnoi clan.
Over the last decade, he has repeatedly threatened to kill the actor, as the blackbuck is considered sacred by the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan. In recent years, police have stepped up Khan’s security and arrested Bishnoi’s aides for arranging weapons and conducting a recce outside the actor’s Bandra residence. The confession does not explain how Bishnoi developed an interest in the Salman Khan case. However, police officers who have questioned him in the past suspect that conversations with community members inside the Jodhpur prison may have prompted him to take up what he saw as the cause of the Bishnoi people. “Khan did visit Jodhpur court at least twice then. We can only guess that in prison, everyone must have discussed Khan’s case, which fascinated Bishnoi to take up the cause. That is only a guess. He did not tell me. From Ajmer, he allegedly planned the murder of a Jodhpur businessman Vashudev Irani, for which the Rajasthan Police arrested him again. Of all the cases that moved Bishnoi between prisons, the murder of Irani matters the most. The case brought him back to Jodhpur, and months later, put him in the same court complex as Khan. Back then, the Jodhpur court was regularly hearing Khan’s case. This is what the police have documented of that day, based on Bishnoi’s confession: “Lawrence Bishnoi was arrested in the murder case of Vashudev Irani and brought to Jodhpur where he was produced in court.
When Khan allegedly hunted the blackbuck near Jodhpur between September 26 and October 2, 1998, Bishnoi was just seven years old, living in a village in Punjab’s Fazilka district. In 2024, the Bishnoi gang also killed Nationalist Congress Party leader Baba Siddique, allegedly over his closeness to Khan and to establish the gang’s supremacy in Mumbai. His stay in the prison around August 2017 also coincided with the final stages of the proceedings in Khan’s case at the local court. He was also acquitted earlier that year (2017) in one Arms Act case. In August 2017, Bishnoi was transferred to the high-security Ajmer prison after officials found he was using mobile phones to run his operations. Police records showed that sometime in December 2017, Bishnor was taken into custody and transferred to Faridkot prison (it is unclear for which case), only to be brought back to Jodhpur again for a hearing in the Irani murder case on January 4, 2018 – when Khan also visited the court for the closing arguments in the blackbuck case.
Because salman Khan had hunted blackbuck and was not receiving punishment from the court, which greatly hurt the Bishnoi community.”, while coming out of the court Salman Khan had also arrived for a hearing in the same court whom the accused Lawrence Bishnoi threatened to kill.
A second theory is he wanted to be a bigger criminal and make a name in the Mumbai underworld by targeting Bollywood, for which he found a perfect plan: using Salman Khan’s name,” a Delhi police officer said on condition of anonymity.
