Four years of running ended in Las Vegas on Friday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation detained Himanshu Bhau, the 24-year-old gangster who sits on the most-wanted lists of two Indian police forces and has been the subject of an Interpol Red Notice since August 2023, in the Las Vegas, Nevada, region after receiving intelligence from Indian agencies, according to multiple Indian media reports.
Bhau — whose real name is Himanshu Ritoliya — is wanted in dozens of criminal cases spanning murder, attempted murder, kidnapping and extortion across the northern Indian states of Haryana and Delhi and neighboring Uttar Pradesh. Indian outlets report roughly 50 cases against him in Haryana alone. India’s National Investigation Agency, the country’s federal counter-terror probe body, has also registered cases against him.
His file reads like a compressed history of how street-level crime in northern India turned into an international manhunt. Born in 2002 in Ritoli village in Haryana’s Rohtak district, Bhau first entered police records in 2020, when he was still a minor, after what investigators describe as a botched killing attempt tied to a dispute in his home village. He was sent to a juvenile observation home in Hisar — and then, along with a group of other inmates, he escaped.
“He belongs to Ritoli in the Rohtak district of Haryana and had got involved in crimes while still in school. He first entered police records in 2020 following a botched killing attempt involving a localized dispute in his native village,” an investigator recalled, speaking to the Times of India.
From there, the allegations escalated. In 2022, Bhau publicly claimed responsibility for three murders committed within 24 hours in Haryana. Investigators have linked him and his network to the killing of a man at a Burger King restaurant, shootings at the premises of gym owners — allegedly to squeeze out extortion money — and gunfire outside the home of YouTuber Elvish Yadav. Most recently, his name surfaced in the September killing of gym trainer Vijay Kumar in south Delhi’s Aya Nagar, where two attackers on a motorcycle fired around 15 rounds. Police are examining a social media post attributed to Bhau that claimed responsibility for that attack.
Bhau is described by Indian police as a rival of jailed gangster Lawrence Bishnoi — whose network, run with associate Goldy Brar, has become one of India’s most feared crime syndicates — and as being aligned with the rival Neeraj Bawana and Naveen Bali groups. Investigators say he fled India on a passport obtained with forged documents and directed his network from abroad; at various times, reports placed him in Portugal, even as his associates allegedly carried out shootings and extortions back home.
The detention is also a reminder of how visible the FBI has been lately on high-profile cases: the bureau raided the home of US lawmaker Ilhan Omar at dawn just this week.
An Interpol Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant. It is a request to police forces in 196 countries to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition — and Bhau’s, issued in August 2023 at India’s request, is what effectively made him undetainable almost anywhere in the world without risk. His reported capture in the United States shows the machinery working as designed: Indian agencies passed intelligence to American counterparts, and the FBI acted on it.
That cross-border dimension is why this arrest matters beyond India. In recent years, South Asia’s gang networks have gone transnational — fugitives directing murders, extortion and intimidation from overseas through encrypted chats and social media posts claiming “responsibility” for attacks. Taking Bhau off the board severs one node of that network, but it also tests a practical question in US–India security cooperation: how smoothly a wanted fugitive moves from an American cell to an Indian courtroom.
The Times of India reports that Bhau is likely to be handed over to Indian law enforcement agencies in the coming days, with officials working through the legal process required for his return. After four years on the run — from a juvenile home in Hisar to a detention in Las Vegas — the road appears to be leading back to India.
