Convict son-in-law who jumped parole arrested
AMBALA: A Special Task Force (STF) of the Haryana Police on Monday arrested the convict in the 2001 murder case of former MLA Relu Ram Punia and seven of his family members, from Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut. The accused, Sanjeev Kumar, the son-in-law of the late legislator, was impersonating as a ‘sadhu’. He was serving life sentence in Kurukshetra jail when he got two weeks’ parole in 2018, but he never came back. His wife is also a convict in the same case.
Sanjeev was arrested by the STF’s Ambala unit on Monday from near the UV Club on
Meerut bypass road. Having a bounty of ₹1 lakh on his head, Sanjeev was handed over to the Yamunanagar police that presented him before a court on Tuesday and was sent to two days’ police remand, it is learnt.
The police had first traced him at chadariya village near Surat in Gujarat. Ambala STF deputy superintendent of police Kulbhushan said he was staying in the garb of a ‘sadhu’ at a small ashram. “Several of our teams were stationed in Gujarat and UP. He left his ashram in Gujarat before our team reached there. Being a native of Saharanpur, we were sure that he will be around,” the officer said.
For getting parole, the convict
had given his address as Changnouli village in Bilaspur area of Yamunanagar where he never reached and didn’t report to the authorities even after 10 days of his parole period ended. In June 2018, a case was lodged on the complaint of Kurukshetra jail deputy superintendent police.
Mehroof Ali, CIA-2 in-charge of Yamunanagar police said, “A local, Kulbeer, whom Sanjeev had befriended in Faridabad jail, helped him arranging fake documents. When Sanjeev was out on parole from Faridabad jail, he met Kulbeer here and prepared documents that his mother was a tenant at the said address. Later, he furnished the same documents for parole and fled.”
Crime and punishment
According to police, Kumar, 45, along with his wife and his eight other family members, was booked at Hisar’s Uklana for the murder of Punia, his second wife and six others, including an infant, at a farmhouse during the intervening night of 23rd and 24th August in 2001. Sanjeev, a graduate from Kurukshetra University, met Punia’s daughter Soniya at a sports meet in Lucknow in 1997 and married her a year later. The crime was an outcome of dispute over Punia’s property. The couple was sentenced to death by a local court in 2004, sentenced to life term by the HC and the top court also awarded them capital punishment, which the SC later changed to life imprisonment. In 2008, Sanjeev and several other inmates were booked after a tunnel was found at the Ambala Central Jail, a police official said.