Phagwara ‘double murder’: Probe hits a wall as police find key accused tough nut to crack

A week after a history-sheeter, Harvinder Singh, 35, was arrested from Gujarat in connection with a ‘suspected’ double murder of a lawyer and his woman companion in Phagwara, the Kapurthala police are yet to recover the bodies.

The police, in a joint operation with the Gujarat police, had arrested Harvinder from a dhaba at Lakadia village, 52 km from Bhuj. He is the key suspect behind the kidnapping and murder of lawyer Sanjeev Kumar and his friend Anju Pal, who has been missing from Phagwara since April 19.

Phagwara’s superintendent of police (SP) Rupinder Kaur said the investigation is on and the accused has been in their custody for nine days from May 2 onwards.

“We are hopeful of cracking the case in a day or so. The accused keeps changing his statements and location, where he had possibly disposed of the bodies,” SP said.

She added that several police have been formed to locate bodies at the spots as the accused confessed to destroying all the evidence in the case.

Harvinder, alias Pinder, was serving life imprisonment for the murder of then Moga deputy superintendent of police (DSP) Balraj Singh Gill and his woman friend Monika Kapila in a Ludhiana farmhouse in 2012. He was released on parole two months ago and was to report back to prison on April 23.

The preliminary investigation suggested that Anju Pal was married to Harvinder but later separated and began living with Sanjeev. “There appears to be no forced entry and exit in the flat where both the victims were putting up. Initially, both Anju Pal and Harvinder planned to kidnap and eliminate Sanjeev, but later Harvinder possibly changed his mind and killed her after suspecting her of double-crossing him,” a police probe has revealed.

The police have already arrested three accomplices of Harvinder for committing the crime. Though the police are yet to recover the bodies, they have seized the lawyer’s car from Ludhiana.

According to the police probe so far, Harvinder is learnt to have confessed to kidnapping Sanjeev and Anju on the night of April 19 and murdering them the next day. He fled Punjab and went to Kutch, where he took up a job at a roadside eatery.

In his complaint at the Phagwara sadar police station on April 23, Sanjeev’s father Sudesh Lal said his son had gone to meet his friend Anju at her seventh-floor flat in a high-rise building near Paragpur village on the Jalandhar-Ludhiana national highway.

Anju was staying there with her 16-year-old daughter from an earlier marriage.

The accused, along with his three accomplices, managed to sneak into the building and barged into her flat on April 19. Sanjeev and Anju were taken away at gunpoint after the girl was confined to a room. On April 23, security staff of the building managed to enter the apartment and rescue the teenager.