An accused in a six-year-old sacrilege case was hacked to death by unidentified masked intruders at his home in Ladpur Turan village of Punjab’s Fatehgarh Sahib district late last night. The victim, identified as Mewa Singh (51), had been out on bail for the last seven months.
Police have launched an investigation to track down the assailants, who managed to flee the scene after the attack.
According to the police, the incident took place around 1:30 a.m. when the attackers entered the house and assaulted Singh with sharp-edged weapons, severing his head and one of his hands.
The victim’s daughter, who witnessed the horrific attack, said she and her mother woke up to her father’s desperate cries for help.
“My father had gone out of the room to use the washroom when we suddenly heard him screaming, ‘Save me, they are killing me, they are killing me.’ We rushed out to save him,” she said.
When the mother-daughter duo tried to intervene with a wooden stick, the armed intruders tried to attack them as well.
“Two men were brutally attacking my father. When we tried to defend him, they lunged at us too. We had no choice but to lock ourselves inside a room to save our lives,” the daughter added, explaining how they frantically called their neighbours for help from inside the locked room.
Hearing the neighbours arrive and knock on the gate, the attackers scaled the boundary wall of the house and escaped under the cover of darkness.
Fatehgarh Sahib police officials rushed to the spot after being alerted by the villagers and took the body into custody for post-mortem. Forensic teams have also collected blood samples and other evidence from the crime scene. The family maintained that they had no personal enmity or ongoing disputes with anyone in the village.
Mewa Singh was a prime accused in a sacrilege case registered in October 2020 at the local Gurdwara Sahib in Turan village under Mandi Gobindgarh police station. Following his arrest in 2020, he spent nearly a year in prison before being released on bail.
Due to a spinal injury that prevented him from attending subsequent court hearings, his bail was cancelled, leading to a second arrest. He was released on bail again seven months ago and was working at a local mill after shutting down his tailoring business.