Patparganj murder: Police find CCTV footage of suspects, no arrests yet

On Wednesday around 7 am, Rahul Singh Nagar was leaving the park outside Aditi Apartments after his morning walk when the gunmen fired at him.

A day after a 40-year-old man was attacked by gunmen, chased to a nearby apartment and then shot dead in East Delhi’s Patparganj, police said they have found that four suspects were caught on CCTV footage. Police said the photographs of the four were captured while fleeing the crime scene on two motorcycles. No breakthrough was made in the case till Thursday as the identity of the suspects was yet to be established.

Nagar was injured but they chased him to the housing society, where he tried to hide behind parked cars, and shot him dead, police said.(AFP)

On Wednesday around 7 am, Rahul Singh Nagar was leaving the park outside Aditi Apartments after his morning walk when the gunmen fired at him. Nagar was injured but they chased him to the housing society, where he tried to hide behind parked cars, and shot him dead, police said.

Investigators said they have focused their probe on the involvement of one of his rivals, who was allegedly involved in a near-fatal attack on him in November last year. While three suspects were arrested for opening fire at Nagar outside a gymnasium in Mandawali then, his rival who had planned the attack was arrested in Noida in a different case by the Uttar Pradesh police. The prime suspect, an alleged criminal in western Uttar Pradesh, had intentionally got himself arrested to avoid a possible revenge attack, officers associated with Nagar’s murder probe said.

An investigator on condition of anonymity said that Nagar was involved in a property dispute over a house with some people, including a man currently in jail. The house was owned by senior bureaucrat BK Bansal, whose entire family including him allegedly killed themselves at their flat in east Delhi’s Neelkanth apartments in 2016. Bansal was arrested in July 2016 by the Central Bureau of Investigation on alleged corruption charges.

“In October-November last year, some people tried to take ownership of Bansal’s property in east Delhi using forged papers. This flat is not the one where he and his family took their lives. One person produced a sale-purchase deed that had Bansal’s wife’s signature. The signature was fake as the date mentioned with it was 9-10 months after her death. Our inquiry revealed that Nagar and another person had a dispute over that property,” said the investigator.

It was around the same time that Nagar survived the near-fatal attack in Mandawali even as multiple bullets were fired at him. Nagar managed to flee on his scooter. The involvement of the UP criminal in the attack emerged during the probe and the interrogation of the three arrested suspects, the officer said.

Bansal’s nephew, Vinod Bansal, confirmed that two different groups, were trying to get hold of his uncle’s property and that both the parties had prepared forged documents to claim the ownership.

“They had put their locks on the main gate. The police had asked me to file an FIR. But I decided against it after knowing about some dangerous people who were interested in the property.”

Deputy commissioner of police (east) Jasmeet Singh said, “Multiple teams are working on Nagar murder case and they are probing the role of the people involved in the previous attack. The case will be solved soon.”