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Woman hires hitmen to kill Sikh fiance in Pak as she didn’t want to marry: Cops
Ravinder Singh’s body was found in a stormwater drain in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Sunday with a bullet injury to the head. Prem Kumari, his fiance, has been taken into custody in Mardan.
Ravinder Singh, the 25-year-old Sikh man who was found murdered in Peshawar, was shot dead by hitmen contracted by his fiance, Peshawar Police told local media on Friday. His murder, which was reported a day after an angry mob threatened to storm the Nankana Sahib Gurdwara, was seen to be a targetted killing of a member of the Sikh community.
Ravinder Singh’s body was found in a stormwater drain in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Sunday with a bullet injury to the head. His brother Harmeet Singh is the first Pakistani Sikh to join the electronic media.
Local media reports quoting the Peshawar Police as saying that Ravinder Singh was shot by hitmen hired by his fiance, Prem Kumari.
Prem Kumari has been taken into custody in Mardan, one investigator told local media.
Police claim that Prem Kumari had hired hitmen because she did not want to marry Ravinder. She had agreed to pay ₹7 lakh for the contract killing and had paid half the amount in advance.
Ravinder Singh, who hails from the remote Shangla district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, had moved to Malaysia and was in Pakistan for his wedding.
The hitmen, police said, killed Ravinder Singh in Mardan town, about 50 km from Peshawar city.
The breakthrough in the case came when one of the hitmen was apprehended by the police in Mardan, police said.
The hitmen dumped his body at a deserted place and called the family from Ravinder Singh’s phone to demand a ransom. According to the police, this was done to divert investigations into the murder.
Ravinder Singh’s brother Harmeet Singh had responded to news of his brother’s murder with an appeal to Pakistanis to highlight the tragegy so that his brother’s killers are brought to justice.
“We do not have personal enmity with anyone,” he said. He added that Sikhs were being repeatedly targeted and there is no protection for Pakistan’s minorities.
India strongly condemned Singh’s murder, describing it as “the targeted killing of [a] minority Sikh community member in Peshawar that follows the recent despicable vandalism and desecration of the holy Gurdwara Sri Janam Asthan at Nankana Sahib and the unresolved case of abduction, forced conversion and marriage of a Sikh girl, Jagjit Kaur.
