A senior vernacular journalist, a property dealer and seven others have been booked by Chandigarh police on Monday night under a 3 crore property fraud case. The accused journalist is Sanjeev Mahajan and dealer Manish Gupta.
The accused force entered a two-storey building of one named Rahul Mehta in Sector 37 in 2017 and took illegal possession of the first floor from tenant Pradeep Rattan and confined him in a room for a few days and tortured him. The accused took Mehta’s signature in a blank cheque and papers. The FIR stated that an accused named Surjit Singh, a property dealer who was murdered last year had taken Mehta to his friend’s farmhouse in Gujarat in 2017 and made him stay there for some time. Mehta was then shifted to an ashram in Maharashtra and he was then shifted to various ashrams in Delhi and Rajasthan.
In the meantime, the accused have sold the property by using Mehta’s fake signature for 3 crores.
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Rattan had in 2017 lodged a police complaint about the illegal possession of the property and that he was forcefully thrown out of the house, but the police had taken no action. In 2020, Rattan again filed an FIR about the same. After receiving a fresh complaint SSP Chahal constituted a special investigation team and traced the original owner of the property, Rahul Mehta, from an ashram in Gujarat and recorded his statement.
Mehta told the police that he has not sold his house to anybody to date and an FIR was lodged naming 9 people under relevant sections of the IPC for abductions, trespassing and extortion.