JOIN USSacked Uttarakhand minority commission chairman Sukhdev Singh Namdhari has been booked for the murder of Hardeep Singh (Ponty) Chadha as investigators said on Thursday that he, along with his personal security officer Sachin Tyagi, had fired bullets at Hardeep.
The police said that the eyewitness statement recorded during investigation is also a ground for his arrest and for booking him under Section 302 (murder) of Indian Penal Code.
The investigators said he had fired two shots from his gun — later tampered by his son and relatives — at Hardeep during the gun fight between liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother Hardeep Chadha on November 17 at farmhouse number 42 located at Central Drive in Chhattarpur area of South Delhi. Both of them had died in the gun battle.
The probing agency said that they have still not found the two cartridges fired by Namdhari as he sent his pistol to his hometown Bajpur in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district. Though police have recovered the pistol they have not found the cartridges which may have been collected from the spot, it is suspected, and thrown somewhere. The police also said that Namdhari was absconding for three days before he was finally arrested from his hometown on November 23.
They said that they want to recover the vehicles and arrest Namdhari’s henchmen who had come to forcibly take possession of the two farmhouses — 42 DLF Central Drive farmhouse and C-98 at Bijwasan in Kapashera.
Custody extended
Namdhari was produced before a city court on Thursday as his five days’ police custody was to expire. The court extended the custody by three more days to give investigators more time to unravel the mystery and to establish his role.
Metropolitan Magistrate Gaurav Rao extended the custody till December 2.
The crime branch sleuths told the court that they have pressed murder charges against him as the casings of two bullets fired at Hardeep from his pistol were missing from the spot. Opposing the plea for police custody, Namdhari’s counsel R S Malik said it was not required as the alleged weapon used for firing had already been recovered.
Meanwhile, the court sent six others, who were arrested for allegedly trespassing into and looting the disputed property at Chhattarpur to 14 days of judicial custody.
On November 20, police had arrested four people identified as Uday Raj Singh, Bhupinder Singh, Raj Pal and Anand Singh Bisht. While Uday Raj Singh, 44, was Ponty’s personal security officer, 36-year-old Raj Pal was his daughter’s personal security officer. Before that on November 19, two of Ponty’s staffers — Madan Rana and Vijay Malik — were arrested for forcibly taking possession of Bijwasan’s farmhouse and throwing Hardeep’s men out of the premises.