Sippy Sidhu, who was also a corporate lawyer, was shot dead in a park in Chandigarh in 2015. (File)
Nearly seven years after the murder of a national-level shooter in Chandigarh, the Central Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday arrested an accused named Kalyani Singh, daughter of Himachal Pradesh High Court's Acting Chief Justice Sabina.
The first person to have been arrested in the case — even though she was a reported to be a suspect for long — Kalyani Singh is believed to have been accompanying another person who also shot Sippy Sidhu. The murder was the result of a relationship gone sour, sources told NDTV.
The agency has got four days' remand to interrogate Kalyani Singh. The CBI suspected her role since the early stages of the probe in 2016 as it repeatedly said "a woman was accompanying the murderer".
The bullet-ridden body of Sukhmanpreet Singh alias Sippy Sidhu, who was also a corporate lawyer, was found in a park in Sector 27 of Chandigarh on September 20, 2015. Sidhu, who was 35, lived in Mohali. He was a grandson of Justice SS Sidhu, a former judge of Punjab and Haryana High Court.
The case was handed over to the CBI in January 2016 after the intervention of the Punjab Governor, who also serves as the Chandigarh UT Administrator. In September that year, the CBI announced Rs 5 lakh for anyone with clues.
In a newspaper advertisement at the time, the CBI said, "There is reason to believe that a woman was accompanying Sippy's killer at the time of the murder. The said woman is also being given this opportunity to come forward and contact us if she is innocent. Otherwise it shall be presumed that she was a party to the offence."
As the case dragged on, in December 2021 the CBI increased the reward for clues to Rs 10 lakh. It had filed an 'untraced report' in the court in 2020, seeking to continue the probe "into the role of a woman". At the latest hearing, the CBI sought a month's time to file a status report.
On Wednesday, a CBI spokesperson said, "During further investigation, the alleged involvement of accused (Kalyani Singh) came forth in the case. Accordingly, she was examined and arrested."
She was produced before special judge Sukhdev Singh and remanded to four days' custody of the CBI.