Sacked chairman of Uttarakhand minorities commission Sukhdev Singh Namdhari was today picked up for questioning by Delhi police from his home in the hill state in connection with the Ponty Chadha case.
Namdhari, who was with Ponty at the time of his killing in Chattarpur farmhouse in New Delhi, was picked up at his residence in Bajpur in Udhamsinghnagar district and was being brought to the national capital for interrogation, a senior Delhi police official said.
In Delhi, police said they will question Namdhari if he had any role and why he accompanied Ponty to the farmhouse in Chattarpur where Ponty and his brother Hardeep were killed in a deadly shootout.
Delhi police had yesterday claimed that Namdhari’s men could have aided the liquor baron in taking control of the disputed farmhouse hours before the killings last Saturday.
Ponty and Hardeep, the brothers who had a dispute over properties, were killed when both sides opened fire at each other in a farmhouse owned by their family. Namdhari was present at the spot when the incident took place.
Namdhari refuted reports suggesting that he had gone into hiding after the incident. “I filed the FIR in connection with the shootout incident and have been always ready to cooperate with the police in its investigations,” he said in Bajpur.
On reports that police had no clue of his whereabouts, Namdhari said he never went into hiding. “I never absconded and neither of my two mobiles was switched off over the past few days as reported in a section of the press,” he said.
“In fact it is me who asked the the Delhi police team to come over to my place,” he said.
Prior to the gunbattle at 12:30 pm which claimed the lives of the Chadha brothers, Ponty’s men had allegedly entered the farmhouse at around 11 am, fired in air and snatched mobiles of Hardeep’s staff before throwing them out.
“Some people have given us statements that Namdhari’s men were also part of the group (that trespassed into the Chhattarpur farmhouse). We are verifying that,” officials said, adding that they have not given any clean chit to anyone.
Namdhari’s PSO Sachin Tyagi had opened fire at Hardeep after he fired bullets at Ponty. Tyagi had told police that he had opened fire in defence and to protect Namdhari.