The Interviews Case

In June 2019, Jeet Thakur Sahai had gone to Haridwar as he was getting engaged to a girl named Namrata Sinha there. It would be an arranged marriage. He was to be there for a week and the wedding would happen later in the year.

On his second day there, he received a call from his classmate Inspector Dev Kulkarni.

Inspector Dev: “Sorry, buddy. I needed some help from you. I know that your engagement is tomorrow evening and I look forward to attending the party then.”

Jeet: “No problem Dev. How can I help you?”

Inspector Dev: “I need you to come to my police station for a few hours today and help me with a case.”

Jeet: “Tell me the address. I will be there in an hour.”

After obtaining the address, Jeet went to meet Inspector Dev. He explained that four people were recently murdered in their station’s jurisdiction in Haridwar. They were found dead on weeknights at around 7 pm near an old office which was quite far away from the area’s office buildings (about 2 km away). When the police did more searching they found a torn resume and a job classified near one of the corpses. The job classified mentioned “Bookkeeper required – Job in Amritsar. Recruitment in Haridwar. Good Pay.” It also had more details.

Jeet requested to see if any of the dead victims had a criminal record. Inspector Dev’s colleague Inspector Piyush Mathur checked the police database and only one of them had a criminal record. 5 years ago, one of the victims (Vijay Khurana) was working in an accounting firm at Amritsar and had embezzled 9 lakh rupees from there. He was caught and was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

Upon doing more investigation, it was found that Vijay was the only one caught, but his other former colleagues Ritesh Singh, Rupak Khosla and Amjad Siddiqui were also involved. It turned out that these were the other victims.

The accounting firm in Amritsar was Nikhanj & Nikhanj. The owners were two brothers, Rakesh Nikhanj and Govind Nikhanj. They were very angry with Vijay and did not forgive him even after he had gone to prison. By hiring a private detective they found out that their other employees (Ritesh, Rupak and Amjad) had helped Vijay. They were all fired from their jobs a few years ago.

More recently, Rakesh and Govind conspired with their friend Hardeep Goyal in Haridwar. He owned an old office in Haridwar. They put up a fake classified advertisement in the newspaper for a good job and received more than 80 applications in a week. By looking over the applications, they saw that Vijay, Ritesh, Rupak and Amjad were amongst the applicants. They called each of them on individual weeknights for interviews and murdered them one by one.

A lookout was issued by the Haridwar Police for North India and Amritsar Police caught Rakesh, Govind and Hardeep in a car about 65 km east of Amritsar the next morning. They were trying to go to a village near Amritsar. One of the local police officers spotted their car en route to Amritsar and alerted his colleagues near Amritsar. So, Amritsar Police under the leadership of Inspector Jatin Baweja caught them in the car. Then they informed Haridwar Police so that the latter could come and get them.

Inspector Dev thanked Jeet for his help. Jeet told him that he was glad that he could help out.

That evening Dev attended Jeet and Namrata’s engagement. It was a very nice party attended by both families, relatives, friends, etc.

In a few days Jeet returned to Delhi so that he could return to his official work. He was looking forward to his wedding with Namrata in the next few months.