Namdhari, Tygai sent to Tihar Jail till Dec 13

Sacked Uttarakhand minority commission chairman Sukhdev Singh Namdhari and his personal security officer Sachin Tyagi were sent to Tihar jail on Friday till December 13 for their involvement in deadly gunfight between liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his younger brother Hardeep Chadha.

They were brought before the court as their police remand ended on Friday. Metropolitan magistrate Rajinder Singh sent Namdhari and Tyagi to judicial custody after the police said that they do not need them for interrogation.

The court also directed the jail superintendent to lodge Tyagi in a separate jail meant for undertrial policemen on his lawyer’s requested who said that other prisoners might harass him in the jail.

Namdhari, who was charged for allegedly killing Hardeep, was in police custody for interrogation for 13 days. Tyagi, a constable with Uttarakhand Police since 2005 and was attached with Namdhari as his security officer since January 2012, was interrogated for three days by the police in the case.

Namdhari was arrested on November 23 from his hometown in Bajpur in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar district.

When Namdhari was in police custody, he was taken to various places in Uttarakhand, Punjab and UP for identification of his associates. However, no fresh arrest, other than that of Sachin Tyagi, was made on his instance. Other than this, police recovered the crime weapon from his Bajpur farmhouse.

Police are yet to arrest Namdhari’s son Maninder Singh, who is absconding from their house in Uttarakhand and Jagbir alias Sonu, who tampered with the weapon of offence at the behest of Sachin Tyagi.

Ponty and Hardeep, who had an ongoing property dispute, were killed in a shootout at a farmhouse in Chattarpur area of south Delhi on November 17 after which Delhi police has arrested a total of 10 people including Tyagi and Namdhari under various criminal charges.

All other accused have been charged with offences including criminal conspiracy, attempt to murder, dacoity, assault, destruction of evidence, trespass, illegal confinement and kidnapping.