Vigil on interstate highways, link roads intensified

Our Correspondent

Abohar, November 28

The district police have strengthened vigil on the Abohar-Sriganganagar national highway and the Abohar-Hanumangarh state highway to check the movement of suspects. Police nakas have been put on all rural roads which link the Abohar subdivision with the neighbouring Rajasthan.

Senior Superintendent of Police Narendra Bhargav visited the state and national highways to check security arrangements following recent developments in the state. He reviewed the arrangements later at a meeting in the subdivisional police complex here in the evening. He asked the station house officers to intensify checking of vehicles on the inter-state border, besides strengthening the police set up at bus stand and other sensitive public places.

Two recent incidents in the neighbouring Rajasthan had also put the Punjab Police on alert. The Churu police had nabbed a Nakodar (Jalandhar) resident, Gurveer Singh, who was smuggling 159 kg of poppy husk on the Hanumangarh mega highway in a truck with a Punjab registration number on November 25. The consignment was hidden under onion bags loaded at Indore in Madhya Pradesh.

Earlier on November 23, Baba Lakha Singh, a Sikh leader, was shot dead by three car-borne miscreants at his house in Rohrianwali village on the Abohar-Hanumangarh road. The Hanumangarh police teams were dispatched to Punjab, believing that the killers had escaped to the neighbouring area. Baba had been under threat from hardliners for not fully complying with Sikh tenets. The Rajasthan police had provided him a security guard for past the three years but he was not present when the armed miscreants struck. The Rajasthan police teams are still looking for suspects in Punjab.