Ministers on leave, cops fail to solve murder cases

Paralysed bureaucracy, deteriorating law and order and sluggish investigations have become the order of the day in Punjab, still under the model code of conduct.

Three high-profile brutal killings of serving and retired Government officials have shown glaring loopholes in running the administration when the State is headless and waiting for the poll results.

Three different high-profile murders, including that of a DSP, shook the State within two weeks of polling on January 30. Ironically, the police have failed to make any headway in these cases. The cops are on their toes and clueless, the ruling party leaders are missing and there seems to be no accountability.

Just after the day of polling, Ministers and senior leaders went on leave, some to foreign destinations, leaving the State in the lurch. State Home Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal, head of the police force, too is away. In the meantime, the State’s law and order situation has turned critical with the cops failing to solve the cases.

The police are in dark in the murder cases of Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Balraj Singh Gill and Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI) Harbhajan Singh, one more murder case of retired chief engineer Sat Prakash Bedi and his doctor wife Gurcharan Kaur has been added to the unsolved case tally.

Bedi couple was found to be brutally murdered at their residence in Garshnakar, Hoshiarpur on Sunday. They were strangulated before they died. Some valuable items, including their car, were missing from the house. The deceased, Bedi was father-in-law of Punjab IAS, PK Janjua.

Hoshiarpur Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Balkar Sidhu said that they were investigating the case with all possible angles. “It might have been possible that the murderer tried to give the angle of robbery all though motive of killing was something else,” said Sidhu on phone. A car of the couple is missing from the house. They returned back to their home on Thursday from the house of their son living in Mohali.

The SSP said special branch and CIA staff have been working to solve the case as soon as possible. Hopefully the case will be solved very soon, he added.

Moga DSP Balraj Singh Gill murder mystery is getting murkier by the day. He was found dead with a woman friend Monika Kapila at a farm house located in the outskirts of Ludhiana on February 2. Their neck was slit by a sharp edged weapon.

The police have started the investigation on various angles but so far the killers are still at large. DSP’s family accused the police of not following the leads. A relative of the family who did not want to be identified said that not only the family, all those people who knew Balraj are surprised at the manner in which the investigation is unfolding. “We thought that the police would solve the case but it now shows that they are nowhere near the truth,” he said.

Two weeks later, when the police did not get any lead in the case, they urged the government to transfer four officials who had earlier served in Ludhiana for years before being transferred on the eve of elections.