(Reproduced
from Times of india December 20, 2007, frontpage )
CRPF officer
to hang for killing son
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Moga (Punjab): In what would rank as
the rarest of rare cases of paternal cruelty, a CRPF
officer was on Wednesday sentenced to the gallows by
a lower court in Punjab for organizing the beheading
of his 20-year-old son whom he saw as an impediment
in his affairs with women.
Deputy commandant Harjinder Singh of the CRPFs
153 Battalion, along with three others, was sentenced
to death by additional district and sessions judge B
S Sandhu for the murder of Baghel Singh, a
polytechnic student whose headless body was found
from an irrigation canal about three days after he
was reported missing by his friends on January 21,
2003.
Harjinder Singh clearly had no use for his family. He
had deserted his wife and refused to pay for his
sons education, forcing her to leave her young
school-going son to stay with friends in a rented
room and take up a teachers job in Nagaland in
1993.
Not content with driving out his wife and kid, whom
he saw as hurdles in his affairs, the CRPF officer
regularly harassed the wife to provide him with girls
to feed his sexual appetite even as he started living
with his maidservant Summandeep Kaur, who was named
as an accomplice in the case but acquitted for lack
of evidence.
When
Baghel and his mother Charanjit Kaur
approached CRPF brass to have them
persuade her wayward husband to meet the
sons education expenses totalling
Rs 5,000 a month, little did they realize
it would drive the man to murder.
Officer
threatened wife, son
Moga (Punjab): A CRPF deputy
commandant has been sentenced to death for ordering
his sons killing. The sequence of events
leading to the murder paint reveal a sordid plot. On
the evening of January 20, 2003, when Baghel
Singhs roommate Manandeep Singh came back to
the rented digs, he found Baghel missing and four men
drinking in the room. He reported the incident to the
principal of Lala Lajpat Rai Polytechnic institute at
Ajitwal in Moga district next morning and a police
case was registered soon after.
The FIR in the case said when Baghel returned to his
room after attending his grandfathers cremation
in Kapurthala, the three hired assassins pounced on
him, thrashed him and took him away in a car. A
headless body surfaced about three days later in the
Abohar canal and police called in Charanjit Kaur from
Nabha, who identified her son from his clothes and
distinguishing marks on his body. Later, police took
samples of his clothes, skin and blood samples from
Charanjit Kaur for DNA testing to confirm the
identity of the corpse.
During hearings, Charanjit Kaur told the court that
Harjinder Singh regularly threatened her and the son
and spread the canard that she was mad. She said that
after his superior officers intervened once, he paid
her Rs 5,000 a month for four months and then
stopped. After that the officer, who had filed a
divorce case, hired the killers to get rid of his
son. TNN