Two rel­a­tives of a fa­ther and son who were killed af­ter a pur­port­ed shoot-out with po­lice at a Cunu­pia Church on Thurs­day re­main in cus­tody as po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tions con­tin­ue.

Po­lice said of­fi­cers of the An­ti-Ex­tor­tion Unit vis­it­ed the Com­mu­ni­ty Bible Church, on Per­sad Av­enue, at around 5.10 am when they were shot at by per­sons in­side the com­pound.

Of­fi­cers re­turned fire, killing 52-year-old Alvin Bharath and his son, Arvind Bharath, 28.

Po­lice found a pis­tol and a re­volver on each man.

Two of their rel­a­tives who were in the church at the time, a 51-year-old woman and a 15-year-old boy, were de­tained and tak­en to sep­a­rate po­lice sta­tions, where they re­mained up to Fri­day af­ter­noon.

Po­lice con­firmed the woman and boy were ex­pect­ed to be in­ter­viewed, as in­ves­ti­ga­tions in­to re­ports of ex­tor­tion were still on­go­ing.

Pas­tor at the Com­mu­ni­ty Bible Church, Bick­ram Singh, told Guardian Me­dia on Thurs­day that while he was aware that a fam­i­ly was rent­ing a room at the church, he could not pro­vide any de­tails on what led to the shoot­ing.

Sev­er­al res­i­dents of Per­sad Av­enue said they were con­cerned about the pres­ence of strangers rent­ing apart­ments or homes in Cunu­pia.

One res­i­dent said he felt that peo­ple from out­side Cunu­pia rent­ed apart­ments and used them as a base of op­er­a­tions for oth­er crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.

When con­tact­ed for com­ment, Cunu­pia coun­cil­lor Richard Sukdeo said he had heard com­plaints from res­i­dents about the preva­lence of strangers and strange ve­hi­cles in dif­fer­ent parts of the com­mu­ni­ty.

He not­ed that while sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ty was of­ten re­port­ed to po­lice, they were lim­it­ed in what could be done, as po­lice of­fi­cers would act on­ly when a crime took place.

Sukdeo there­fore urged land­lords to adopt more strin­gent mea­sures in vet­ting prospec­tive ten­ants to lim­it the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an in­flux of crim­i­nals but ad­mit­ted this was a chal­lenge.

“What hap­pened with the rent­ing is that some­times peo­ple rec­om­mend oth­er peo­ple.

“Like, I may know you, and I know you have a place to rent; I can rec­om­mend some­one else, so that’s how it goes in these lit­tle vil­lage rentals, so it’s dif­fi­cult to get peo­ple to do the prop­er check and bal­ance on prospec­tive ten­ants.

“So it’s a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion in terms of how we’re re­al­ly do­ing the check and bal­ance, so it’s re­al­ly up to the land­lord to make it their busi­ness be­cause they (land­lords) don’t no­ti­fy us as coun­cil­lors; all we can do is sug­gest the cre­ation of What­sApp groups and to be vig­i­lant.”

Sukdeo said there have been ef­forts to have dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties form their own com­mu­ni­ty What­sApp groups to stay con­nect­ed and vig­i­lant of any sus­pi­cious ac­tiv­i­ties.