Meher murder accused shot dead

Lucknow: The main accused in the Meher Bhargava murder case, Sachin Pahadi, was shot dead in a police encounter in Lucknow on Saturday morning.

Pahadi, his friend Vijay Kanaujia and two other men were coming from Sitapur to Lucknow on two motorbikes when they were intrecepted by the Special Task Force (STF) and the Lucknow Police near the IIM campus near Madiyoan Road.

The accused started firing at the police and in the ensuing gunbattle, Pahadi and Kanaujia were shot dead. The encounter happened between 0530 hours IST and 0615 hours IST.

The other two men, however, managed to escape though the police has launched a manhunt to track them down.

Pahadi had already escaped one police encounter in Lucknow's Kaiserbagh area in March, with the police claiming that he had sustained injuries and would be tracked down soon.

The police had even offered a reward of Rs 20,000 for anyone who caught Pahadi.

SSP Lucknow, Ashutosh Pandey told CNN-IBN in a telephone conversation that they had been tipped off that some notorious criminals were going to travel from Sitapur to Lucknow.

"The Lucknow district police and the STF led an ambush near the IIM crossing. We saw four people on two bikes approaching us. When we tried to stop them, they started firing at us and started moving towards the IIM road. We chased them and in the encounter, two of the criminals - Sachin Pahadi and Vijay Kanaujia - were killed while the other two managed to escape," says he.

Ashutosh Pandey also said that Kanaujia had been accused for kidnapping many businessmen from Kanpur.

Meher Bhargava had been shot on February 28 in Lucknow when she fought with Pahadi and his friends for harassing her daughter-in-law.

She was shot outside her house, near the SSP's residence in Lucknow. She was taken to the Apollo Hosptial in New Delhi where she died on March 25.

Though Pahadi had always been the prime suspect, in March, another accused in the case, Sunny Rawat had confessed to shooting Meher.

The confession had thrown the UP police in a tizzy as they were claiming that Sachin Pahadi had shot Meher.

The first hint that the police investigation was not heading in the right direction came when Meher's driver, who had chased the criminals, told the police that the actual shooter was Rawat.

Then Meher's husband and UP Congress leader Luv Bhargava had also told the police that he believed his driver and that Rawat was the real killer.

Rawat is already in police custody.

(With inputs from Abhishek Patni)

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