Jagir wants SAD leader’s murder re-probed

Aman Sood

Tribune News Service

Patiala, April 27

Senior SAD leader Jagir Kaur today said she would approach Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal for a detailed investigation by a special investigating team (SIT) into the murders of party leader Jaspal Kaur Dharni and her son Ajit Singh.

Dharni was the SAD’s Patiala women wing president while Jagir Kaur is the unit’s state in charge.

The police had recently arrested the family’s driver for allegedly killing the mother-son duo for an Innova that he wanted to use as a taxi to eke out a living.

After attending the bhog ceremony of the victims, Jagir Kaur said she refused to buy the police theory that the duo were murdered for a vehicle that “the accused wanted to own”.

“This theory is unacceptable. It’s hard to believe that a woman like Dharni can be strangulated and then dragged and thrown into a water channel by a person single-handedly, and that too for a car,” she said.

Jagir Kaur claimed that a detailed investigation into the murder was needed to bring out the “truth” as there were “several loopholes” in the police theory presented before the media. “I will apprise the Chief Minister about the case,” she said.

Asked if she would demand a CBI probe, Jagir Kaur said “there were many able officers in the Punjab Police and, therefore, they only needed proper investigations”.

The police had last week arrested the driver, Bakhtaur Singh Bhura. His arrest came two days after 24-year-old Ajit’s badly decomposed body was found in his house in Old Bishan Nagar. Jaspal Kaur’s body was recovered from a canal near Khanauri headworks in Sangrur district on April 10, but she was not identified till her son’s body was found.

The police claimed Bhura had accompanied Dharni to a SAD rally in Dhuri on April 9 and while returning to Patiala, he reportedly stopped the vehicle at a secluded place near Seona village around 8.30 pm. “Bhura strangulated Dharni with a crepe bandage and threw her body into the canal near Ablowal village. The accused, in between, kept on attending Ginny’s calls on his mother’s mobile phone,” Gurmeet Chauhan, Patiala SSP had claimed last week.

“Later Bhura rushed to Dharni’s house in the wee hours and hit Ginny on the head with a wooden laundry bat and then strangulated him around 2 am. He then locked the house and left,” Chauhan had said, adding that the sole purpose of the crime was to “steal the Innova” of the victims. On Saturday, dissatisfied with the investigations, Dharni’s sister Sukhdev Kaur had demanded that “all guilty persons should be brought to book”.

The SSP said their initial investigations pointed out the theory of Innova being the sole reason for the crime, but there was no clean chit to others known to Dharni yet. “A team has already been deputed for a further probe into the case to ascertain if there are more angles to it,” he said.