March 20, 2009 11:55:54 pm
Police investigate role of an insider
A Senior official at a leading cellular service provider,Sameer Watts,lost his weeklong battle for survival at Fortis Hospital here in the wee hours of Thursday.
Watts,in his mid-30s,was shot in the head near the Dussehra Ground in Phase VIII,Mohali,on the night of March 12.
Working as Deputy General Manager with Airtel in Mohali,Watts was declared dead at 4 am after the life support system,on which he was put ever since hospitalisation,failed to keep him alive.
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His condition was deteriorating gradually for the last 24 hours and he was not responding to medical interventions. All possible medical assistance was extended to him ever since he had been put in the ICU for a week, a statement issued by Fortis Hospital reads. The body was handed over to the victims parents after a medico-legal postmortem was conducted by a board of medical experts at Mohali Civil Hospital.
Civil Hospital SMO Dr H S Sarang said the medical board,comprising Kanwaljit Sandha,Vijay Bhagat and Sandeep Bansal,recovered a metallic piece of bullet from deep inside the victims brain. Watts was cremated in Manimajra later in the evening. His mother Manju and wife Simrat with their two-and-a-half-year-old son Rudransh were inconsolable,while his father Colonel (Retd) Surinder Kumar tried hard to put up a brave front. Simrats maternal uncle Jasbir Singh Bir,who is Patiala Divisional Commissioner,also attended the funeral.
Meanwhile,the police have converted the FIR initially lodged for attempt to murder under Section 307 of the IPC to that of murder under Section 302 of the IPC.
Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Jatinder Singh Aulakh said preliminary investigations had pointed towards the role of people related to the victim.
We will now speed up the investigations with the help of the victims family members,who were busy attending to Watts in the hospital, said Aulakh,while hoping for an early breakthrough.
Though the used cartridge recovered from the victims car was of that of a .315-bore weapon,a bullets part recovered from his brain will be sent for forensic tests to confirm the weapon used in the crime,revealed Deputy Superintendent of Police (City-II) Swarandeep Singh.
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