ubeen Garg’s cousin and Assam Police DSP Sandipan Garg was arrested on Wednesday in connection with the singer’s death in Singapore last month. The DSP was remanded to seven-day police custody by the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) of Kamrup Metropolitan district, he said.
The case was registered under various sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder and causing death by negligence.
The singer drowned while swimming in the sea in Singapore on September 19. His cousin Sandipan was present with him on a yacht when the incident took place. “We have arrested Sandipan Garg. Now, we are doing the necessary legal formalities,” CID Special DGP Munna Prasad Gupta told the media. Sandipan, an Assam Police Services (APS) officer of the 2022 batch. This is the fifth arrest in the case.
Earlier, North East India Festival chief organiser Shyamkanu Mahanta, the singer’s manager Siddharth Sharma, and his two band members — Shekhar Jyoti Goswami and Amrit Prabha Mahanta — were apprehended. They are now in police custody. The apprehended police officer, who was working as the co-district in-charge superintendent of Boko-Chhaygaon in Kamrup district, was interrogated several times in the last few days over the singer’s death in Singapore last month.
“Our team took him (Sandipan Garg) to a court here. We just got the news that he has been given seven days of police remand, although we sought a 14-day remand,” Gupta said. “The department is also verifying if he had taken proper permission from the Government for travelling to Singapore. As per the service rule, a public servant cannot travel abroad without proper permission from the government,” he said.
Meanwhile, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the chargesheet in the investigation into the death of Zubeen will be submitted within the stipulated period of three months.
The Assam Government will “definitely ensure justice to him,” Sarma asserted. ‘The inquiry is proceeding on expected lines. We have made one arrest after the other, and I am sure that the Assam Police will submit the chargesheet within the stipulated time frame,’ he said on the sidelines of a programme in Dibrugarh. ‘We are duty-bound to provide justice to him and we will not spare anybody in that context,’ he said.