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Five met on Facebook, planned loot, had drinks and ended up killing cabbie in Panchkula

PANCHKULA: Five people dreaming of becoming rich overnight met on Facebook and chalked out a plan to loot a petrol pump but ended up killing a taxi driver in Pinjore on September 9, police said on Monday after cracking the blind murder case with the arrest of four of them.


The four are Pawan Gupta (26), who belongs to Badaun district of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and was working with a private security agency as a guard in Baddi, Himachal Pradesh (HP); Rohit Seth (18), a photography aspirant working in Mumbai and belonging to Mirzapur district in UP; Shushanto Sardar (19), a driver and a resident of Kolkata, West Bengal; and a juvenile of UP.

One juvenile is absconding.


Panchkula deputy commissioner of police (DCP) Kamaldeep Goyal said the juvenile who was caught had met Gupta once or twice. All the others were strangers. It all started when the juvenile posted a link, “jiska koi nahi uska mai hu (I am there for those who have no one)” on Facebook. Rohit, Shushanto and the other juvenile who were in search of work contacted him. The juvenile and Gupta called them to Baddi.

The DCP said four accused met for the first time in Baddi. Shushanto could not reach as he was coming from Kolkata in a train. While discussing work, they suddenly planned to loot a petrol pump in Maddawala village of Pinjore. They decided to rob a car first but their attempt failed on the Kalka-Shimla highway, the DCP said.

When Shushanto arrived in Baddi, all of them had liquor at a local tavern in Baddi on September 9. Then Gupta floated the idea to loot a car from a cab driver working at the railway station in Kalka. All of them hired a cab to go to Solan at midnight. On the way, one of the accused pointed a pistol at the cab driver, Parvinder alias Bittoo (40), a resident of Kalka. When the cab driver tried to save himself, a shot was fired accidentally and Bittoo died on the spot, police said.

The accused dumped the body of the victim in Khedawali village, Kalka, and the cab near a river in Barotiwala, near Baddi. Later, all if of them fled, said inspector Karambir Singh, in-charge, crime investigation agency, 19.

DCP Goyal said, “It was a blind murder case for us. A team of CIA-19 took the help of cyber cell and CCTV cameras to find the accused. During interrogation, Gupta, the prime accused, narrated their story. The murder weapon is yet to be recovered. Gupta has a criminal record and was booked for firing in the air in Baddi earlier.”

The accused were booked under sections 302 (punishment for murder), 34 (act done by several person with same intention) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender) of the IPC. A local court remanded them in police custody.

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