Noida's night of horror

10 Apr 2008, 0127 hrs IST

NOIDA: Goons on bikes, stopping people at random and firing at the smallest provocation. Noida lived through a nightmare on Tuesday when a 25-year-old former airhostess was shot in the dead of night on a main road, just an hour after a retired army officer escaped death in resisting an attempt to snatch his car. The night had, in fact, begun with some incidents of mobile snatching elsewhere. The common thread in all these incidents was a gang of bikers, though the cops are still not sure about their identity or if more than one gang was involved.
A former employee of Virgin Atlantic, Sheeba G Thomas, was returning to her home at C-block in Sector 49 from a friend's house in Delhi around 11.25pm. Just outside the house of a Supreme Court lawyer, at the intersection of Sectors 31 and 36, four men on two bikes came from the opposite direction. They intercepted her Hyundai Accent car, forcing her to hit the brakes.

"Before she could realize what was happening," an eyewitness told the police, "two men got off a motorcycle and rushed towards her. She screamed at them and then slammed the car door into an assailant". Stepping out of the car, she kicked the man, who fell on the ground. Seeing this, the other man shot Thomas in the chest, killing her on the spot.

The assailants then left with her mobile phone. They also took away the car keys, perhaps to prevent anyone from giving chase. But her laptop, her handbag and cash were not touched. There were also some Virgin Atlantic brochures in the car.