The Mumbai police are not ruling out the possibility of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang’s hand in the attack on Saif Ali Khan at the Bollywood star’s home in the western suburb of Bandra in the early hours of Thursday.

According to Neeraj Uttamani, the COO of Lilvati Hospital, the actor was wheeled into the hospital with multiple injuries. He was operated on by a team of doctors and is in recovery, according to a statement from the actor’s team.

The six stab wounds Saif sustained during the scuffle with the intruder have led the police to suspect that it may not have been an ordinary case of a burglary attempt gone wrong, highly placed police sources said.

Asked by PTI if the incident involved a robbery attempt, a senior Mumbai police officer declined to comment, saying that it was an ongoing investigation.

According to sources, some days earlier the actor’s family had a run-in with a domestic help who was caught stealing.

“We have some suspects and are probing every angle,” said a senior officer of the Mumbai police’s crime branch.

A forensics team visited Saif’s apartment and collected fingerprint samples.

The actor’s team has maintained it was an attempted burglary.

Why the Bishnoi question arises

Saif along with his co-actors Tabu, Neelam Kothari and Sonali Bendre were acquitted in the killing of two blackbucks – sacred to the Bishnoi community of Rajasthan – during the shooting of Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Saath Saath Hain in 1998.

Bollywood star Salman Khan was the only accused to be pronounced guilty by a Jodhpur court in 2019.

The gangster Lawrence Bishnoi was barely five years old when the blackbuck hunting episode took place.

The Bishnoi community was founded by Jambeshwarji, a guru from a Rajput Panwar family born in the 15th century. He had laid down tenets for the community to follow. Eight of these 29 rules were about protecting the flora and fauna, including khejri trees and animals and birds like blackbuck, chinkara and the great Indian bustard.

The shadow of the blackbuck hunting incident came to haunt Salman Khan last year when two gunmen opened fire at his Galaxy apartment residence, also in Bandra West like Saif’s Satguru Sharan apartment complex.

Lawrence Bishnoi – who has been in Gujarat’s Sabarmati jail since September 2023 – had from a prison van outside the Jodhpur court on January 6, 2018 threatened to kill Salman.

Bishnoi did not wait for Salman Khan to come to Jodhpur and made an attempt on the actor’s life in Mumbai. In October, ahead of the Maharashtra state polls, close friend to many a Hindi film actor and politician Baba Siddique was shot dead outside his office. Being a friend of Salman Khan was motive enough for Bishnoi to allegedly order the hit.

Salman Khan had in an interview in 2008 denied shooting the blackbuck: “It’s a long story there and I wasn’t the one who shot the blackbuck.”

He had also refused to name the shooter and despite the attempt on his life and the lingering threat not broken his silence.

Though Bishnoi is never reported to have made any threat to any of the co-accused in the poaching case, the Mumbai cops are not ruling out any of the possibilities.

Soon after the murder of Siddique, Salman Khan’s former girlfriend Somy Ali had expressed her desire to speak with Bishnoi over a Zoom call in November last year.

“I don’t want Salman’s family or friends, Kajol, Tabu, Ajay Devgan, Raveena [Tandon] or Saif to be harmed. We have law and justice, so what is this that Salman should apologise for? No one should be murdered. This is wrong. That’s why I want Lawrence to talk to me. I will explain to him that this is wrong,” Ali had said in a statement.

“I will apologise to him on Salman’s name. Salman had told me that he was unaware that the Bishnoi community worships the blackbuck.”

Saif is not the only member of the Pataudi family to have been linked to blackbuck hunting. His father, the late Mansur Ali Khan, the Nawab of Pataudi and former Indian cricket team captain, was caught with carcasses of a female blackbuck and rabbits from two of the vehicles accompanying the late cricketer and his friends, returning from a hunting expedition in the forests of Jhajjar in Haryana on June 5, 2005.

A .22 bore rifle registered to Pataudi’s daughter, Soha Ali Khan, was also recovered. Four years after Pataudi’s death in 2011, a special environment court in Faridabad had pronounced the six members of the team guilty.

The late cricketer’s name was dropped from the list of accused.

Satguru Sharan, the apartment complex where Saif lives with his family, on the junction of 24th Road, 29th Road and St Theresa Road, has multiple layers of security like most such high-profile residences in tony Bandra West.

Visitors to any of the apartments are allowed only after the nod from the flat-owner or the resident, in case of a tenant, and have to sign twice, first at the main gate and later at the lobby of the building.