Eight Uttar Pradesh teams hunt Ankit Baliyan’s killers across the Haryana line

Uttar Pradesh police formed eight teams on Friday to find the four men who shot Haryanvi singer and YouTuber Ankit Baliyan outside a gym in Shamli on 26 August. Meerut Zone ADG Bhanu Bhaskar sat for nearly two hours with Saharanpur DIG Abhishek Singh and officers from Muzaffarnagar, Baghpat and Shamli. After the meeting, teams were told to work the Haryana side of the border. STF units from Shamli, Baghpat and Meerut were already camping there.

CCTV is the spine of the file. Footage from Shamli, Loni in Ghaziabad, Delhi and Sonipat shows four men on two motorcycles leaving the gym area and riding west. One clip from the gym itself, broadcast on Friday, runs about 25 seconds. Baliyan, 35, walks out with a kit bag toward his car. Four men follow. One in black holds a pistol. Police sources told India Today that 12 rounds were fired from .30 and .32 calibre pistols and that some shots went into the air. Akhilesh Yadav, in a post on X, spoke of 18 rounds. The post-mortem will settle the count that hit the body. Baliyan was declared dead at a community health centre the same evening.

The song, the claim, the family

Hours before the shooting Baliyan had promoted a song, “Baby Badmash,” with a line about a murder on the road. The coincidence is ugly and it is not evidence. What is evidence is the complaint his father, Satvir Singh, filed against four unnamed attackers, and the social-media post in which a person claiming Gogi-gang membership took responsibility. Police said on Friday they are testing that claim. They have not named a handler.

Baliyan came from Banti Kheda in Shamli. He had been a kabaddi player before the YouTube years. His channel sat at about 3.68 lakh subscribers. The songs ran on guns, SUVs and rivalries and drew millions of views. Last rites were held in the village on Thursday after the post-mortem. Relatives blocked a road, then lifted the blockade after talking to officers. His wife has given the police a deadline in public, saying she will harm herself if the killers are not held within four days. That statement is a pressure tactic and a warning. It is not an investigative lead.

Samajwadi Party and Congress leaders have used the killing to attack the Yogi Adityanath government on law and order. Yadav called it an attack that reduced the state's record “to zero” and said the Jat community wanted arrests at once. Speculation that Baliyan was preparing for panchayat polls has not been confirmed by the family or by the district administration.

What the eight teams have to show

The geography is compact. Shamli sits about 15 kilometres from Haryana. The motorcycles used that fact. Identification from helmeted CCTV is slow work. Number plates, fuel stops and phone dumps are the next layer. If the Gogi-gang claim holds, the case moves from a local shooting to an organised-crime file that already has a history in western Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. If it does not hold, the police are left with four faces and a road.

Bhaskar's review is the state's way of saying the case is no longer a Shamli station diary. Eight teams and an STF camp in Haryana are a resource shift. The test is an arrest list. Until those names appear, the public record is a dead singer, a 25-second tape, two motorcycles and a claim that has not yet been stood up.