New Delhi: Sacked Uttarakhand Minorities Commission chairman Sukhdev Singh Namdhari was taken into custody by Delhi Police on Friday. He is now being brought to Delhi, where he'll be further questioned in connection with the double murder case of liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother Hardeep.
A Delhi police team picked up Namdhari from his farmhouse at Bazpur in Udhamsinghnagar district in Uttarakhand and took him to the national capital, police sources said. The police also questioned at his farmhouse before taking him into custody. Sources said that he could also be arrested on charges of trespassing.
Namdhari, who was present at the family farmhouse of Ponty where the two brothers opened fire at each other, is being seen as a key witness in the case. Sources said the police are bringing Namdhari to Delhi so that they could question him over the sequence of events that led to the death of the two brothers.
Meanwhile, Namdhari refuted reports suggesting that he had gone into hiding after the incident. "I filed the FIR in connection with the shootout incident and have been always ready to cooperate with the police in its investigations," he said.
On his removal from the minority panel, he said it was a political matter and he would not like to comment on it at the moment. Namdhari was removed from the panel after his name came under a cloud in the wake of reports about his presence at the farmhouse at the time of the shootout.
Ponty and Hardeep, the brothers who had dispute over properties, were killed when both sides opened fire at each other last Saturday in a farmhouse owned by their family. Police had on Thursday claimed that Namdhari's men could have aided Ponty in taking control of the disputed farmhouse hours before the killings.
Prior to the gunbattle at 12:30 pm on Saturday, which claimed the lives of the Chadha brothers, Ponty's men had allegedly entered the farmhouse at around 11 am, fired in air and snatched mobiles of Hardeep's staff before throwing them out. "Some people have given us statements that Namdhari's men were also part of the group (that trespassed into the Chhattarpur farmhouse). We are verifying that," Vivek Gogia, Joint Commissioner of Police (South-West), told reporters on Thursday. He, however, did not give a direct reply when asked about reports that Namdhari was absconding. There were reports that the police is on a lookout for Namdhari as his mobile phones are switched off and he is untraceable.
Namdhari, however, refuted reports that he went into hiding. "I never absconded and neither of my two mobiles was switched off over the past few days as reported in a section of the press," he said on Friday, adding, he was always available to assist the police in its investigations into the shootout incident. "In fact it is me who asked the the Delhi Police team to come over to my place," he said. On the farmhouse shootout, Namdhari said, "It was a painful incident."
(With additional information from PTI)
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