How CA Rajesh Goyal’s murder was cracked in 12 hours

CHANDIGARH: A PAN card and a little questioning around was all that Chandigarh Police needed to crack the murder case of chartered accountant Rajesh Goyal. Around 7pm on May 21, 2007, his peon, Kamlesh, had walked into his second-floor office after running an errand and found him in a pool of blood in his cabin.
Coming up the staircase itself, he had sensed something was off, when he bumped into four earlier visitors who now had blood on their clothes, and they just rushed downstairs when he asked them how it had happened. Goyal had sent Kamlesh out to get photocopies of some documents when the four attackers came to the

office. While they might have assumed he hadn’t recognised them, Kamlesh knew two of them from their previous visit to the office 10 days ago.

The peon called the cops. As the news of this murder spread in the Sector-42 market, a crowd gathered outside. Goyal’s parents also got there and were shaken. In a day and age where there were no CCTV cameras inside offices, police relied on experts from the Sector-36 Central Forensic Science Laboratory for collecting evidence such as blood samples. The fleeing men had also been spotted outside. One of the eyewitnesses, Bhagwant Singh, told police how he was sitting with a friend behind the showrooms when he saw these four men running towards a golden Hyundai Santro car, how they crashed it into a road divider while reversing, and how they sped away towards Furniture Market Chowk.

MOTIVE AND ACCUSED

Police tracked the man whose PAN card was found on the scene of crime. He was Sector-21 share trader Kanav Arora, who would be convicted of murder, later, along with three others. The quartet had embezzled 77,000 shares worth Rs 1.9 crore from the CA and decided to kill him when he started asking for the money that one of his clients had invested.

The client, Iqbal Singh Sabharwal, had purchased the shares through Kanav. At the end of the closing year, the company offered a bonus of 1:1. Arora’s employee Shiv Kumar transferred the shares into his account by using Sabharwal’s deposit inspection slip and invested the sum into another business, in which he took a loss of Rs 25 lakh. Goyal was killed so that Arora and his accomplices could pocket the money and recover their loss. They eliminated Goyal but the shares belonged to Sabharwal, who told police about his money.

THE CRACKDOWN

In less than 12 hours of the murder, police had solved the case. Arora, his employee, Shiv Kumar of Nayagaon, and call-centre worker Mandeep Singh of Mohali’s Phase X, who was promised Rs 14 lakh for killing Goyal, were exposed. Three of them were arrested from their homes, while Arora’s friend and Sector-21 resident Ashwinder Singh was caught by inspector Amanjot Singh (then a subinspector) near the railway station.

Except Arora, all other accused were in their early twenties at that time. Police also found their getaway Santro car. It had a fake registration number when it came to the CA’s office. Another client of Goyal, Arvind Singh Bedi, also became a witness in the case, because he also saw the four men alight from the CA’s office staircase with blood on their hands.

THE FULL CIRCLE

Goyal left behind a young wife, a daughter, a son, and his parents. To his wife, Sonia, he was a good husband. After several rounds of trial, the court of district and sessions judge S K Jain convicted the four men of murder on July 5, 2013, and sentenced them to a life term in prison three days later.

They filed an appeal but the Punjab and Haryana high court upheld the lower court’s decision.