Devil’s Advocate continues ………….

The youngster entered Gurcharan Singh’s chamber but with him two other men also sneaked in. Gurcharan Singh, engrossed in a file, raised his head to greet the boy but was startled to see the two men beside him. He recognized them immediately, as they were the ones who had threatened him in court. Before he could react, both of them pulled out their revolvers and shot him at point-blank range, killing him on the spot.

In the melee that followed, Krishna Tyagi slipped out of the room to call the police. The cops reached the spot, investigated the case and identified the killers as Brij Mohan Sharma, Manjeet Singh and Gerard Innis aka Jerry. Manjeet and Jerry were soon arrested by the Delhi Police. Brij Mohan, however, absconded, formed another gang and continued to commit heinous crimes, particularly kidnappings for ransom, mainly in UP.

On 30 July 1991, not even two months after murdering Bawa Gurcharan Singh, Brij Mohan and three of his gang members, kidnapped a property dealer from Jhansi. They asked his family to deliver the ransom money on 5 August at a hotel in Mathura, where the Jhansi Police led by Shailendra Sagar, SSP, had an encounter with the kidnappers. Brij Mohan Sharma was killed in the exchange of fire and the kidnapped person was rescued. Eight years later, on 14 May 1999, the sessions court in Delhi convicted Manjeet Singh and sentenced him to life imprisonment, while Jerry was acquitted. And now, almost nineteen years later, stood before me Manjeet Singh, claiming he was the main killer of my beloved friend.

I stared at Manjeet as he humbly confessed to his crime before me. I wondered if he understood the full import of the ghastly crime he had been a party to. How pulling the trigger of his gun had taken away a precious life, caused acute grief to a family and left a void in the lives of all those who knew Gurcharan Singh.

To be Continued ………….