(Representational Image)
A year ago, when Sarvan Chaudhary (25) last visited his mother at her Siddharth Vihar residence in Ghaziabad, he was told never to return. “Coming here meant we would be troubled… and at risk. We are simple people… so we asked him to stop visiting,” said Udayveer Singh (32), Chaudhary’s brother-in-law.
Early on Sunday — in a joint operation by the Uttar Pradesh Crime Branch and local police — Chaudhary was shot dead in a service lane in Noida’s Sector 122, said Noida SSP Ajay Pal Sharma, who led the team. With a reward of Rs 1 lakh for his arrest, Noida police said Chaudhary was wanted in cases of dacoity, theft, murder, and possession of arms.
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It was at 11 am that his mother received a call from Chaudhary’s lawyer, informing her about the encounter. Since then, his family has been looking for his wife and their two-year-old son, with whom he lived in Delhi-NCR. “Inka kuch ata-pata nahi hai…we don’t know where they live. We waited till 6 pm to conduct the funeral. We still haven’t been able to find them, so we went ahead with the ritual,” Singh said, adding that Chaudhary got married three-and-a-half years ago.
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“But killing Sarvan was not the right thing to do. Police should have caught him, put him in jail, given him the punishment he deserved… but an encounter is unfair. He fell in bad company after Class XII, when he began body-building. We knew he was going to land in trouble some day, but we didn’t expect it would be such an end,” Singh said.
A senior Delhi Police officer claimed that Chaudhary jumped parole in 2016 and had been absconding since. He added that he was a “carjacking expert who would steal cars from the capital, go to Bihar and sell the vehicles in Naxal-hit areas”.
It was after he was accused of murdering a youth in Seelampur in 2017 that Chaudhary came under the radar of Delhi and Noida police, with both forces announcing a bounty of Rs 50,000 each.