The police on Thursday arrested one suspect from Uttar Pradesh who they believe killed journalist KJ Singh and his mother Gurcharan Kaur in Punjab’s Mohali in September.
Officers said that the man – identified only as Gaurav – was caught when he was travelling in Singh’s green Ford Ikon car, which was stolen from his house on September 22 after the murder, The Indian Express reported.
Singh, 64, and his 92-year-old mother were found dead on September 23 inside their Mohali home by their maid. The journalist’s throat was slit and his mother was strangulated. The house was ransacked, and the car, a television and a few other items were missing from the house.
Senior Superintendent of Police Kuldeep Singh Chahal on Thursday said Gaurav may have murdered Singh for revenge. A few weeks before the murder, Singh had slapped Gaurav for allegedly being a nuisance at a park near his house, Chahal said.
“We are yet to interrogate the accused thoroughly,” he told The Indian Express. “We need to find out whether he executed the murders alone or whether he had accomplices.”
The police said Gaurav was intercepted in Singh’s car on the Sohana-Mohali road. The suspect tried to speed off, but a PCR team patrolling the area chased and caught him, Chahal said.
Last week, a Special Investigation Team of the Mohali Police released pictures of five individuals suspected of murdering the journalist. They later found them to be college students.
Singh was a former news editor at The Indian Express and had worked with The Times of India and The Tribune in Chandigarh. He was the third journalist to be murdered in September, after Gauri Lankesh’s murder in Bengaluru on September 5 and Shantanu Bhowmik’s killing in Tripura’s Mandai block on September 20.
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