Jalandhar: Fugitive Khalistan sympathiser Amritpal Singh is said to have evaded capture on the night of March 28 in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur, where he and his companion Papalpreet Singh ditched their Toyota Innova car near a gurdwara at Marnaian Kalan village, during a chase by cops after aides alerted them about a barricade ahead.
Punjab police sources said that they extracted information about Amritpal’s latest movements from two men travelling in a lookout vehicle ahead of the Innova. They were caught at a barricade and allegedly told the cops that Amritpal and Papalpreet had travelled from UP’s Lakhimpur Kheri and re-entered their home state on March 26.
Cops also claimed to have found the car that transported the runaways from Lakhimpur Kheri to a dera near Phagwara, which was a distance of 750km. “They stayed near Karnal in Haryana during their journey and reached a dera near Phagwara on March 26. They spent the night there and took off in an Innova to another dera in Nadalon village of Hoshiarpur the next day,” a police source said.
After lying low there until March 28, they were again on the road to Phagwara. “That’s when a police team chased them (on the Hoshiarpur-Phagwara road). They escaped once again after the vehicle ahead of them was stopped at a police naka,” the police source said.
The sources said a counter-intelligence wing team chasing the Innova spotted four people inside. The abandoned car yielded a collection of clothes during a search, giving weight to the suspicion that Amritpal was frequently changing his guise. Police had scoured each and every house and fields in and around Marnaian Kalan village, but he had vanished.