JOIN USFour more people were arrested on Tuesday for trespassing, kidnapping, firing in the air, dacoity and for beating up Hardeep Chadha’s staff, an hour before the liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his younger brother were killed in a shootout in south Delhi’s Chattarpur area, police said.
Those arrested are Ponty’s men — Uday Raj Singh, Bhupinder Singh, Raj Pal and Anand Singh Bhisht, said joint commissioner of police (south-west) Vivek Gogia. While Uday Raj Singh, 44, was Ponty’s personal security officer, 36-year-old Raj Pal was his daughter’s personal security officer. Bhupinder Singh, a resident of Friends Colony, was a protocol manager at Ponty’s firm. Anand Singh Bhisht, who hails from Almora in Uttrakhand, was Ponty’s driver.
The four men, a part of the group of around 20 people, entered the 42 DLF Central Drive farmhouse at Chhattarpur on Saturday morning, beat up the employees of Hardeep, with whom the liquor baron had a dispute.
They threw Hardeep’s men out and fired in the air to scare them after confiscating their mobile phones to prevent them from making a call to the police control room. The accused were remanded to five days’ police custody by a court.
“Investigation in the case is at the initial stage. The conspiracy behind the incident is yet to be unearthed. All the four accused persons are remanded to police custody for five days (November 25),” the judge said.
The police had sought five days’ remand saying other co-accused are yet to be arrested and these four accused are to be confronted with the articles seized from the farmhouse.
However, their lawyer K K Manan opposed the remand saying since the farmhouse, which the accused had allegedly trespassed into belongs to Ponty, they were unlikely to grab it.
Manan said the case was cooked up with the help of one person (Nand Lal, Hardeep’s car driver), on whose complaint, FIRs under various provisions of IPCs including robbery, trespass, attempt to murder and kidnapping has been lodged.
Meanwhile, the police recovered cartridges of .302 that were fired in the air from country-made pistols.
The total number of arrests has gone up to six. Two other staff of Ponty — Madan Rana and Vijay alias Malik — were arrested on Monday.