Juvenile detained in Ponty Chadha case

A juvenile involved in a string of murders in Uttarakhand has joined the ranks of close to 24 persons to be apprehended for their alleged involvement in the sensational slaying of liquor baron-cum-real estate honcho Gurdeep alias ‘Ponty’ Chadha and his brother Hardeep last November. Jatin Anand reports.

A juvenile involved in a string of murders in Uttarakhand has joined the ranks of close to 24 persons to be apprehended for their alleged involvement in the sensational slaying of liquor baron-cum-real estate honcho Gurdeep alias ‘Ponty’ Chadha and his brother Hardeep last November.

HT Image

The accused juvenile hails from Rudrapur in Uttarakhand. He was one of the armed henchmen Sukh Dev Singh Namdhari, one of Ponty’s associates and ex-chairman of the Uttarakhand Minorities Commission, had brought to assist his smooth takeover of a disputed property at Chhattarpur on November 17.

“He was apprehended for trespassing and under the arms act from Bajpur, Namdhari’s hometown in Uttarakhand on May 7. We produced him before the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) yesterday which sent him to an observation home in Rudrapur,” said a senior crime branch official.

His apprehension takes the total number of people chargesheeted in the case to 22 in addition to Ponty and Hardeep themselves.

Apart from him, another juvenile associate of Namdhari’s was detained and remanded to a Juvenile Observation home in Delhi recently.

On the morning of November 17 last year, liquor baron and real-estate mogul Ponty Chadha and his younger brother Hardeep were killed, allegedly at the hands of each other’s own men, during a pitched gun-battle triggered by a two-month-old property dispute at a south Delhi farmhouse.