For 25 years, man wanted for murder kept Delhi cops on their toes, till his luck ran out

Recounting the case, the DCP said a woman, Krishna Sethi, reported the disappearance of her daughter-in-law on July 1, 2000. “She suspected that her daughter-in-law had an affair with a man named Ajay Kumar Dahiya and the two of them had murdered her son Ashwani Sethi,” the DCP said.

Ashwani’s body was subsequently found in Dahiya’s village, Birdhana in Haryana’s Jhajjar, with gunshot wounds. “Dahiya lured Ashwani to his village and shot him dead,” DCP Kumar said.

Police said Ashwani and Dahiya used to be friends. “Ashwani used to drive Dahiya’s auto. They became close friends,” he explained, adding that subsequently, Dahiya fell in love with Ashwani’s wife, Saroj.

Police said Ashwani smelt something fishy, so Dahiya decided to get rid of him. Dahiya and Saroj initially hid in Baddi in Himachal Pradesh, where he worked as a labourer. “He would frequently fight with Saroj so she left him in 5-6 months,” said DCP Kumar.

Dahiya then relocated to Panchkula in 2001 and got married, said police. He also took on the alias “Sompal” and forged an Aadhar Card, the DCP said.

In 2008, he and Saroj were declared proclaimed offenders.

In July 2024, a Crime Branch team led by Inspector Sanjay Kaushik, under the supervision of ACP Narender Singh, was tasked with tracking him down. “Since it had been almost 25 years… finding him based on an old picture was tough… He used multiple fake identities, changed his locations almost every year, and kept a low profile,” an officer part of the operation said.

“Following trails of his old records, we went to his previous hideouts and then to his village… After tracking his family members, we started tapping into their phone calls,” the officer said. Among the calls, the team grew suspicious of one caller and through further technical surveillance traced it to Kala Amb.

“For three days, the team camped there, blended in with the locals, and gathered intelligence,” the officer recalled. On January 7, the trap was set. With precise coordination and a stroke of luck, the officers pinpointed Dahiya’s location and arrested him from his tea stall.

“He was living with his wife and four children – three sons and a daughter… Every time someone decent-looking went to his tea stall, he would hide inside his home… under the bed or behind the almirah,” said a police officer who was part of the operation.

Dahiya’s wife told police that in such situations, “he feared that police had come to arrest him for his crimes”.

“After marrying his wife in Panchkula, he and his family relocated to Sonipat, where he bought an auto-rickshaw and worked as a driver. In 2020, during the Covid lockdown, they moved again to Kala Amb, where Dahiya opened a tea stall,” said DCP Kumar.