Before Punjab Police were tipped off by an informant that radical preacher Amritpal Singh was in Rode village in Moga on Saturday afternoon, state intelligence agencies were in the dark about his location over the past two weeks, since he was last spotted in Haryana’s Sirsa on April 5, people with direct knowledge of the matter said on Sunday.
After Amritpal’s arrest, investigators are piecing together the full sequence of events since he managed to evade the police on March 18 leading up to his capture on Sunday. According to a senior intelligence official involved in chasing Amritpal over the past few weeks, the preacher managed to reach the house of one of his supporters in Sirsa on April 3, five days after he gave police the slip yet again in a Hoshiarpur village on March 28.
Read | 'Amritpal Singh didn't surrender, arrested after…': Punjab Police on 'operation Moga'
Police teams chasing Amritpal managed to trace some of the people who helped him and his close aide Pappalpreet. In all, eight people have been arrested so far for helping Amritpal after he fled from Mehatpur town of Jalandhar on March 18 during a crackdown on the supporters of his organisation Waris Punjab De.
Intelligence officials said Amritpal and Pappalpreet were spotted in a Hoshiarpur village on March 28, where they decided to split. Amritpal reached Raipur village, where he stayed at a house of one of his associates, Hardeep Singh, on March 29 and 30. Police have arrested a lawyer Rajdeep Singh for helping Amritpal with money and providing a car along with a driver. Intelligence officials believe Amritpal stayed at the driver’s house for two days before leaving with him for Sirsa on April 2.
{{/usCountry}}Intelligence officials said Amritpal and Pappalpreet were spotted in a Hoshiarpur village on March 28, where they decided to split. Amritpal reached Raipur village, where he stayed at a house of one of his associates, Hardeep Singh, on March 29 and 30. Police have arrested a lawyer Rajdeep Singh for helping Amritpal with money and providing a car along with a driver. Intelligence officials believe Amritpal stayed at the driver’s house for two days before leaving with him for Sirsa on April 2.
{{/usCountry}}“He used the driver’s mobile phone. The driver who was also detained by us told us that he left Amritpal in Sirsa. Amritpal wore jeans and a T-shirt provided by the driver,” another official from Amritsar rural police said.
Earlier, on March 18 when they first fled Mehatpur, Amritpal and Pappalpreet reached Ludhiana the same evening and on March 19 they stayed at the house of a woman named Balbir Kaur in Hargobind Nagar for six hours. The woman was a close contact of Pappalpreet, officials said.
Police said that the same evening they reached Shahbad in Kurukshetra district of Haryana, where they stayed at the house of another woman called Baljit Kaur, also a close contact of Pappalpreet. Before police could reach the house, the two headed to Delhi in a bus, the probe has found.
In the national capital, where CCTV footage retrieved by police found Amritpal walking around wearing jeans, he contacted a woman studying in Ludhiana, who was again a contact of Pappalpreet, and stayed at her rented apartment for two days in Delhi.
Before they headed towards Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh between March 22 and 24, police suspect that a dera involved in kar seva (voluntary service) and having a base in Pilibhit facilitated both. A dera follower Joga Singh, a resident of Ludhiana district, drove Amritpal to another dera in Hoshiarpur on March 28 via Uttarakhand in two vehicles bearing stickers of the dera.
“When our team intercepted Amritpal at Marnaian Kalan village, we had credible information that he was heading towards Akal Takht Sahib with a plan to appear at the highest Sikh temporal seat and take shelter but when we tried to follow him, he left the car at a local gurdwara and travelled 10-15km by foot to reach Rajpur Bhaiyan village,” an ADGP-rank officer said.
How Amritpal reached Rode village is not yet known to police, the officer said.
“Where Amritpal was after Sirsa is not yet known as we couldn’t interrogate him after his arrest because he was immediately flown to Dibrugarh,” a Punjab Police investigator said.