Mongolpuri, August 27: A 60-year-old man, who got himself declared dead seven years ago to escape legal proceedings in a maintenance case registered against him by his second wife, has been arrested by the Outer District police from Mongolpuri area.
The accused, Joginder Singh, had proved himself ‘dead’ in a Ludhiana hospital, after a person with the same name died there in 2003.
Singh was finally apprehended from an area near Nawaria Park in Outer Delhi’s Mongolpuri R-Block on August 10. Singh was trying to hide behind a tree to avoid being noticed by a police patrol when he was arrested.
Police said that after Singh’s first wife, Surinder Kaur, died several years ago, he had married one Sukhwinder Kaur of Karnal in Haryana. Kaur currently lives in the Tilak Nagar area.
“However, in time, their relationship became strained and they decided to call the marriage off. Sukhwinder slapped a maintenance case against Singh. To avoid paying the maintenance, Singh started shifting locations frequently,” Outer District Deputy Commissioner of Police Chhaya Sharma said.
In 2002, Singh fled to Ludhiana and married another woman.
It was then that a namesake died in the Civil Hospital at Ludhiana on October 17, 2003. Grabbing the golden opportunity, Singh got himself registered as the deceased at the hospital and sent details of his ‘death’ to his second wife, Sukhwinder Kaur.
However, the matter came to light when Sukhwinder Kaur filed an eviction case against Singh’s niece Avinash Kaur, to whom he had given a house at Mongolpuri in the Capital. It was when Outer District SI Ajay Karan started verifying the facts in the case that he realised Singh was alive.
——-Agencies