A self-professed mobster held what was virtually a news conference from police custody in Uttar Pradesh, appearing to indirectly acknowledge his association with the Lawrence Bishnoi gang and justify the murder of Maharashtra politician Baba Siddiqui, while three policemen watched silently.

“Baba Siddiqui was killed because he was not a good man,” a wounded Yogesh alias Raju, 26, appears to say in a video while being wheeled out of the Mathura district hospital shortly after his arrest on murder charges on Thursday.

“There were charges against him (Siddiqui) under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act. It is said that he had connections with the Dawood gang.”

With the video getting widely circulated by Friday evening, former police chiefs, senior lawyers and many ordinary netizens asked how the police could allow a suspected gangster to address the media while in custody.

Accused in transit are known to throw out a sentence or two at journalists — while the police try to shoo them away — but Yogesh seems to have been allowed to hold forth unhindered. The video is 103 seconds long and appears to have been shot sometime after Yogesh’s media interaction began.

Siddiqui, 66, a former Maharashtra minister who defected from the Congress to the ruling NCP of Ajit Pawar last February, was shot dead on October 12 night in Mumbai. The Lawrence gang has claimed responsibility on social media.

Police sources said Yogesh was not a suspect in Siddiqui’s murder.

Yogesh, who appears to say in the video that he works for the Hashim Baba gang – which police sources said operated under Lawrence’s gang — is accused of the murder of a 34-year-old gym owner in Greater Kailash, south Delhi, in September last year.

Yogesh was arrested on Thursday after being shot in the leg in an encounter with a joint team of officers from Delhi police’s special cell and the Mathura police. The police claim to have seized a .32-bore pistol, ammunition, and a motorcycle.

A former Uttar Pradesh director-general of police told The Telegraph that the media interaction was “bizarre”.

“It seemed as though he was briefing the media, with the police facilitating it. Was it done at the instruction of senior officers?” he said.

“How can the police allow a self-proclaimed criminal to publicly justify the killing of a politician — that, too, from police custody — by making all sorts of accusations?”

The former DGP also criticised the journalists present for “giving a platform to a hardened criminal and making him look like a superhero”.

Supreme Court lawyer Rebecca John said an accused was not “allowed to talk to the media while in police custody”.

Criminal lawyer M.S. Khan, however, said there was no such legal bar and that whatever an accused in police custody told the media amounted to an extra-judicial confession.

“Yes, ethically the police should not have allowed it and the media should not have given a platform to such an accused,” he said.

In the video, a journalist asks Yogesh how gangs gather information before committing a crime.

“These days we have mobile phones, the Internet, Google, and so on. We can find out a lot about a person (target) through these means,” Yogesh purportedly says.

Asked about the Lawrence gang’s next target, he appears to say: “I don’t know about the next target as I am now going to jail. The entire gang is much bigger and there are over 100 members in the gang. The gang has international connections as well.”

Sources said three policemen posted at the Refinery police station in Mathura — sub-inspector Ramsanehi, head constable Vipin, and constable Sanjay — had been suspended on Saturday.