Chandigarh house grab case: Man who bought property surrenders

Saurabh Gupta is among nine people who is accused of kidnapping and torturing a man in April 2017 to secure general power of attorney of his 338 square yards house

After evading arrest for almost four months, Saurabh Gupta, who had purchased the Sector-37 house which was illegally usurped from its owner, surrendered before court on Tuesday.

He was arrested and sent to one day in police custody. (Representative image)

He was arrested and sent to one day police custody. Police had even announced reward of ₹50,000 for a who can provide information which can lead to his arrest.

Saurabh is among the nine people named in the FIR lodged on charges of kidnapping and torturing Rahul Mehta in April 2017, to secure general power of attorney of his 338 square yards house. It was bought by Gupta in March 2019.

Since the beginning, Saurabh had claimed he was unaware of the dispute and was a victim of cheating. He had even sought anticipatory bail, saying that had he known about the dispute, he would not have invested about ₹3 crore in the property. However, he didn’t get relief from the court.

In March, police had arrested journalist Sanjeev Mahajan, realtor Manish Gupta, suspended Chandigarh Police inspector Rajdeep Singh, Satpal Dagar, brother of a UT deputy superintendent of police, and Gurpreet Singh, who impersonated Mehta to execute the property’s sales deed in March 2019.

A police challan has already been filed into the case. Around 10 men are accused of kidnapping and torturing Mehta, 48, the only surviving heir of his family, to secure the general power of attorney of his house and sell it to Manish’s brother Saurabh Gupta for ₹2.9 crore.

Among the other accused are liquor baron Arvind Singla and businessman Khalendra Singh Kadyan, to whom the property’s GPA was transferred, slain bouncer Surjit Singh, and Ashok Arora, Shekhar and Daljit Singh, who purportedly acted as witnesses in the sale of the house.

After the transfer of the GPA, Rahul was abandoned at a stud farm in Gujarat in June 2017, before being shifted from one charitable home to another in Maharashtra, Delhi and Rajasthan, where he was finally traced.

Later, Gurpreet, Singla and Kadyan had surrendered before the court.