Son’s friend, his aide held for Amritsar double murder
They had tea with victim before killing her, daughter, say police
AMRITSAR: Police on Thursday claimed to have solved the murder of a government school clerk and her daughter with the arrest of two men, one of the them a friend of the clerk’s son who had left for Canada last month to study.
The friend, Pankaj Sharma aka Vinay, 21, and his accomplice Neeraj Kumar, 19, of nearby town Chhehrta entered the house on February 5 on the pretext of a courtesy call; and their intention was robbery, police said.
However, it was not yet confirmed if the 40-year-old clerk and her 20-year-old daughter were raped as was suspected (hence names withheld) when the burnt bodies were found after neighbours reported a fire at their house. Police did say that they were “assaulted physically”. The clerk’s body was found charred and the daughter’s body was tied to a bed in a semi-naked state with burn marks, in different rooms of the house in Darshan Avenue.
At Thursday’s press conference, police commissioner SS Srivastava said multiple teams led by senior officers were formed, and the one led by inspector Vawinder Mahajan, in-charge, cyber crime and technical cell, traced the killers based on a tip-off. “Pankaj is a friend of the son of the clerk, and used to come to the house before too. He knew that the two women lived alone since the son had left for Canada,” he said. The clerk was separated from her husband.
“Pankaj was in need of money and made the plan to rob them. He and Neeraj bought a bottle of chloroform from a market on the pretext that they wanted to use it to control their dog,” said the police commissioner. The two men entered the victims’ house around 8.50 pm on February 5, and the mother even had tea for them on the ground floor while the daughter was in a room on the first floor.
‘SHE LOCKED THE
DOG WHEN IT
BARKED AT THEM’ Further making it easier for them, the mother even locked the house dog, a German Shepherded, in a room “because he was barking at the men,” said the commissioner.
“She then went to the first floor to inform her daughter that her son’s friend had come to meet them. When she came back, the men used chloroform to make her unconscious and took some money and jewellery.”
“After they found that the woman had died, they went to the first floor and killed the daughter too as they feared she would disclose their identity,” he added. The they used bedsheets and cushions to burn the bodies “to cause disappearance of evidence”.
Investigators on the condition of anonymity further told HT that the men found the clerk dead after they tried to rape her. “After that, they wanted to sexually assault the younger woman too. They tied her down and then found that she was bleeding owing to her menstrual period,” this officer added. Forensic examination will confirm whether or not the sexual assault took place.
So far, the men have been booked under sections 302 (murder), besides 201 (causing disappearance of evidence), 436 (mischief by fire) and 460 (trespass and causing death) of the Indian Penal Code.
In all this, the men managed to loot ₹650 in cash and some artificial jewellery.
’HATE CRIME’ CHANDIGARH: A sheriff’s office in Illinois, US, is investigating a case of assault on a Sikh man working as an Uber driver that is purportedly a hate crime, reports said on Thursday, after allegations that neither has the attackers been arrested nor the legal provisions against hate crime been imposed.
“Which country do you belong to?... I hate turban people,” a male passenger said and held a gun to the head of Gurjeet Singh, who is also a head granthi (religious community leader) and lives in Northwest Illinois, in the January 28, according to community organisation Sikh Coalition.
Sikh men in America, repeatedly mistaken for Muslims because of their turban-andbeard appearance in a growing atmosphere of Islamophobia, have been victims of numerous hate crimes, including a man mistaken for “an Arab” and murdered immediately after the 9/11 bombings, and six members of a gurdwara in Wisconsin killed in a mass shooting, according to details given in a report in The Washington Post.
Leaders of Sikh Coalition expressed frustration on Wednesday after meeting with Rock Island county sheriff Gerry Bustos, over the fact that the passenger has not been arrested since the attack, which the driver reported to police on January 29, the day after it occurred. The sheriff told the Post that he expects to charge the suspect with aggravated assault and “perhaps further charges” by the week’s end, after he receives information that the sheriff’s office has requested from Uber through a search warrant.
Investigators have interviewed the driver, the suspect and another passenger who was in the car, Bustos was quoted as saying. He reportedly said that the driver picked up the two passengers together around 11 pm, soon after which the male passenger and the driver got into an argument. He said he couldn’t disclose the details of the argument while the investigation is underway. “The argument was about where people’s loyalties lie. There was an argument over where people were from,” he was quoted as saying.
‘US OR YOU?’
The Sikh Coalition said that the male passenger started asking Singh, the driver, a series of questions: “What is your status here? Which country do you belong to? Do you serve your country or do you serve our country?”
The organisation said Singh, a legal US resident who does not speak fluent English, said he serves the US and India, because his parents live there.
ACCUSED GOT THE CAR REFUELED AND TRIED TO ESCAPE WITHOUT PAYING