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Tarn Taran, August 17
Congress MLA Harminder Singh Gill from Patti has accused the police of carrying out shoddy investigation in connection with a murder case wherein a family of Jawanda Kalan village has been accused of beating a labourer to death for allegedly stealing wheat.
The deceased, Sukhdev Singh (50), alias Pappu, a farm labourer of the same village, was beaten to death allegedly by Satbir Singh, his brother Nirvail Singh and Satbir’s son Balraj Singh four days ago.
The accused have been booked under Sections 302, 452, 34 of the IPC, and various sections of the Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribes (SC/ST) Act by the SarhaIi police. Satbir Singh and Balraj Singh have been arrested. They have been sent to judicial custody on the orders of a local court.
MLA Harminder Singh Gill, along with his supporters, reached the SSP office and staged a sit-in on Saturday over the registration of the case against the aforesaid family for the “murder”.
Navreet Singh Jallewal, a senior leader of the party, said the MLA held a meeting with Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Dhruv Dahiya and discussed the issue in detail. After the meeting, MLA Harminder Singh Gill, while addressing newsmen outside the SSP office, said that the police had registered the case in a haste as several facts had been overlooked. He denied that the labour was beaten to death. “Nothing such has been detected even in the postmortem report. The SSP has assured us of reinvestigation,” he said.
The Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) could not be contacted in spite of repeated attempts.
Complainant Nirvail Singh, nephew of the deceased, besides Sukhwinder Singh and Dalbir Singh, members of the deceased’s family, too were present at the SSP office. They alleged that the MLA was acting in a partial way. “The MLA has ignored our loyalty as have been wholeheartedly supported him in elections. We will go on warpath in case the police try to change the facts in the FIR under political pressure,” he said.