NEW DELHI: Kishan Lal, who lived in Tughlaqabad area of Delhi, was stabbed to death on a cold February night in 1997 and the killer was untraceable. Lal, who worked odd jobs, had left behind his wife Sunita, who was pregnant with their first child at the time.
Litigation started in the case and the Patiala House Court declared absconding suspect Ramu, a daily-wage earner, as a proclaimed offender. He lived in the same neighbourhood as Lal. His case file from the pre-digital era continued to bite dust for over two decades until a team of the Delhi Police’s North District which laid its hands on it in August 2021.
A year later, Sunita got a call from the Delhi Police and was asked to reach Lucknow immediately. The police caught hold of a 50-year-old man, whom they believed was her husband’s killer. They wanted her to confirm the identity of the suspect. Sunita, who was accompanied by her son Sunny (24), confirmed that the man was Ramu before she fainted.
“The woman had lost all hopes of getting justice and even closed doors on our police team that reached out to her last year when they started working on this old case. But it was understandable on her part since a lot of time had lapsed,” said Deputy Commissioner of Police (North District) Sagar Singh Kalsi.
The officer heaped praise on the four-member team for cracking the quarter-century old case, noting that it had no eyewitnesses of the murder, no photographs of the accused or clue of his whereabouts. The team had sub-inspector Yogender Singh, head-constables Puneet Malik and Omprakash Dagar under Inspector Surrender Singh with Assistant Commissioner of Police (Operations) Dharmender Kumar as their guide, Kalsi said.
“It was pretty much a wild goose chase for the team where they were hoping to get one substantial clue for several months. During the period, the team went undercover on several occasions for investigation within Delhi and in Uttar Pradesh,” he said.