The district police have arrested a third accused, identified as Sandeep Singh, 23, in connection with the June 22 petrol bomb attack on a clinic run by a homoeopathic practitioner couple.
Superintendent of police (investigation) Heena Gupta said on Saturday that Sandeep, a third-year BA student at a private college in Malout in Muktsar district with no prior criminal record, was apprehended on the Bathinda Ring Road on Friday.
The SP said that Sandeep, a resident of Khuian Sarwar village in Fazilka, recruited the two previously arrested suspects, Nakul Kumar and Gurwinder Singh, paying them ₹500 each to execute the attack. Nakul and Gurwinder are also natives of the same village.
During interrogation, Sandeep told the police that he had been promised ₹10 lakh to arrange the strike, receiving a ₹5,000 advance through a UPI transaction on an unidentified mobile phone that cyber experts are currently tracking. Immediately after the bombing, Sandeep allegedly sent a video recording of the incident to a contact in Pakistan.
The targets of the attack, Rajni Jindal, a BJP district executive member, and her husband Tarsem Garg, chief warden of the civil defence corps, had recently joined the BJP from the Aam Aadmi Party.
The police authorities said that the motive remains unclear as the couple received no extortion threats, but a person who identified himself as Pakistan-based, ISI-backed gangster Shahzad Bhatti used a virtual number to threaten the couple.
The police have seized the mobile phones of all three accused for forensic analysis as teams work to trace the origin of the virtual number and determine where Sandeep hid after the crime.
