Farm worker’s murder solved with arrest of Jagraon man

LUDHIANA: The police on Wednesday claimed to have solved the May 25 murder of a 17-year-old farm worker, with the arrest of a Jagraon man.
Gaurav (name changed) was found dead in a field in Jagraon’s Dashmesh Nagar.
The accused has been identified as Jaspreet Singh Jassa, 49, a native of Manakpur Khedan village in Rajpura, Patiala.
Gaurav, who hailed from Odisha, was an employee of farmer Manjit Singh (name changed). He had gone missing on the evening of May 23. On May 25, a passerby spotted his body and sounded the police.
Ludhiana (rural) SSP Vivek Sheel Soni said, “After the teenager was found dead, an FIR under Section 302 (murder) of the IPC was registered. During investigation, it was found that in 2017, too, a man was killed with the same modus operandi.”
In both the cases, a wire was tied around the necks of the victims and bodies were recovered from the same spot.
During probe, police zeroed in on Jaspreet, who lived near the spot.
The SSP said, “There were many inconsistencies in Jaspreet’s statements. Besides, he tried to mislead the police by introducing himself as Mohammad Abdul. During interrogation, he revealed that he had an altercation with Manjit over the land where he stayed in Jagraon. The plot belonged to an NRI and Manjit wanted Jaspreet to vacate it. To implicate Manjit, Jaspreet had committed the February 9, 2017, murder. The police, however, did not find Manjit guilty at the time even as Jaspreet gave wrong information against him.”
“As Gaurav was Manjit’s employee, Jaspreet decided to kill him and implicate the farmer. After making Gaurav drunk, Jaspreet strangulated him. He tightened the wire around his neck with a plier. Before that, he tried to have unnatural sex with Gaurav, so that the finger of suspicion was pointed at Manjit,” he added.
After the arrest of Jaspreet, police have recovered the murder weapons and clothes of Gaurav.
“We are trying to identify the man he murdered in 2017. We do not have much information about him except that he worked at an eating joint in Ludhiana and was a native of Uttar Pradesh,” the SSP said.