Chandigarh. The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Tuesday acquitted Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh and four others in the 2002 murder case of the Dera’s former manager Ranjit Singh. The head of the Sirsa-based Dera is currently lodged in Rohtak’s Sunaria jail. He is serving a 20-year jail sentence for raping two of his disciples.
Dera chief’s lawyer Jitendra Khurana said, “The High Court has acquitted my client and four others in the Ranjit Singh murder case.” He said that the arguments in this case were already completed and the High Court gave its verdict on Tuesday.
Khurana said that a division bench of Justice Suresh Thakur and Justice Lalit Batra pronounced the verdict on the appeals of Ram Rahim and four others who were convicted by a special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Panchkula, Haryana in October 2021.
The court had sentenced him to life imprisonment in the nearly 20-year-old Ranjit Singh murder case. Former Dera manager Ranjit Singh was shot dead on July 10, 2002 in Khanpur Kolian village of Kurukshetra in Haryana. He was killed for his suspected involvement in circulating an anonymous letter which described how Ram Rahim was sexually exploiting women at the Dera headquarters.
According to the CBI chargesheet filed earlier, the Dera chief believed that Ranjit Singh was behind the circulation of this anonymous letter and hence hatched a conspiracy to kill Singh. Ram Rahim was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2017 for raping two disciples, after which he is in Rohtak’s Sunaria jail. The Dera chief and three others were convicted in 2019 in the case of murder of a journalist 16 years ago.