UP youth held for killing KJ Singh, mother in Mohali
MOHALI: Over a month after senior journalist KJ Singh, 64, and his bedridden mother, Gurcharan Kaur, 92, were brutally murdered in Mohali, police cracked the case with the arrest of a jobless youth who hails from Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh.
Addressing a press conference to announce the arrest on Thursday afternoon, Mohali police chief Kuldeep Singh Chahal said that Gaurav Kumar, 27, who was jobless, was intercepted while driving KJ Singh’s green Ford Ikon car that was missing since the double murder in Phase 3B2 here on September 22.
Assistant sub-inspector Ajay Pathak and constables Parminder Singh and Ranjit Singh, who were on duty in a PCR vehicle at the Sohana gurdwara crossing in Sector 70, Mohali, spotted the car.
“The motive is revenge. KJ Singh objected to Gaurav sitting in the park adjoining his house on September 22. The argument led to a scuffle. Gaurav returned with the knife to commit the crime the same night. He was alone,” Chahal said.
The police displayed the knife used to commit the crime. Two mobile phones belonging to KJ Singh, three of his ATM cards, a DVD player, an Airtel TV set top box and his watch were recovered from Gaurav.
BRUTAL END
KJ Singh and his mother were found murdered on a rainy September 23 afternoon but the postmortems revealed they had been stabbed and strangulated the previous night.
While Singh’s throat had been slit and he had been stabbed in the stomach 15 times, his mother was strangulated. The incident came to light when their relatives went to the house around 1pm the next day.
Singh, a former news editor with The Indian Express, had also worked for The Tribune and The Times of India in Chandigarh.
HIGH-LEVEL PROBE
CM Amarinder Singh asked Punjab Police chief Suresh Arora to set up a special investigation team (SIT). The SIT, led by inspector general (crime) Shashi Prabha, conducted the probe.
After initial hiccups, the police picked up five youth from Bathinda on Monday after going through records of 600 phone numbers taken from the area. They released five pictures of suspects but later found them to be college students.