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Journalism of Courage
DHURI, MARCH 18: Ritu Singla, the widow of engineer Rajinder Kumar Singla, has demanded a CBI inquiry into the mysterious death of her husband who was working as an engineer in a firm based at Calcutta.
Talking to ENS, Ritu said that her husband, a 1984 batch engineering graduate from Guru Nanak Engineering College, Ludhiana, joined the Calcutta firm in 1998. She stated that till January 18, 1999, the family received telephone calls from him twice to thrice a week.
Ritu added that on January 28, Rajinder made a telephone call to his parents-in-law in Bathinda, urging them to save him from the son of his boss.
Rajinder reportedly said that he did not where he was and what kind of injections were being administered to him. The same night, he also telephoned his wife at Dhuri, telling her to reach Calcutta with some relatives and protect him. When the family tried to telephone him from Dhuri, the phone was found to be out of order, said Ritu.
She said that when the family reached Calcutta, they were told that Rajinder has left the factory; they were allegedly not allowed to enter the factory premises. When they came back to Dhuri, they found that Rajinder had not returned home either.
On February 5, the family was informed by a factory official that Rajinder was in a hospital at Rai Bareilly. He was subsequently shifted to a hospital in Lucknow. According to Ritu, the police informed them that Rajinder was found lying at a railway track unconscious, with head injuries and his legs broken.
Since there was no improvement in Rajinder’s condition, his family decided to bring him to Ludhiana, but he died on the way. Ritu said that family has written to the president, the prime minister and the chief ministers of Bengal and Punjab for a CBI inquiry into the case.
