Ranbir

July 4: A 24-year-old MBA graduate who had arrived in Dehra Dun to report for his first job was yesterday chased on the streets and shot dead by police, who claimed an “encounter success” against a criminal before a tour by the President.

This morning the police, who claim Ranbir Singh had pulled a gun on them during a vehicle check and fled before being shot, beat up his aged father, uncle and younger brother when they protested at the morgue.

Some people, however, came on TV to say they saw the police whisk Ranbir away in a jeep, suggesting he was killed in custody.

Ranbir, a resident of Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, had arrived in the Uttarakhand capital on Thursday. He was to join Kotak Mahindra on Monday as a trainee manager, said family members who were in Dehra Dun to receive the body.

“We have ordered a magisterial probe and another probe by the divisional IG (inspector-general) into the alleged fake encounter,” Uttarakhand principal secretary (home) Subhash Kumar said.

The police said they were searching vehicles around 12.30pm, a few hours before President Pratibha Patil’s scheduled arrival, when Ranbir and two friends arrived on the scene on a motorbike.

When the police tried to frisk them, “they held a pistol to a sub-inspector’s head and snatched his service revolver”, Dehra Dun SSP A. Sinha said.

The youths rode off down Ring Road but another police team surrounded them in the Ladpur jungles on Dehra Dun’s outskirts, near the Digambar Jain Dharamshala where Ranbir had checked in. The MBA was shot while his companions fled.

“Ranbir shot at the police; he was killed in the retaliatory fire. We recovered a pistol, ropes and a knife from his bag,” Sinha said.

Two grocers, Sita Devi and Gyanesh Mishra, said they saw Ranbir surrender to the police on Ring Road as his friends ran away. He was taken away in a jeep around 12.45pm, an armed policeman sitting by him. Sources said Ranbir was shot five times in the neck. The police claimed the trio’s bike had been stolen from a man called Ram Mehr in Ahir village in Haryana’s Panipat.

Police sources said two sub-inspectors, G.C. Tamta and Ajay Singh, and inspector Nitin Chauhan were at the encounter spot. None of them was injured.

The questions the police face are:

If Ranbir was fleeing, why wasn’t he shot in the leg?

How did three youths overpower a cop during a security drill?

Where are Ranbir’s companions?