‘Dead’ man lands in CBI net 35 years after bank fraud

PATIALA: A man accused of bank fraud in 1985, who had managed to produce a fake certificate to prove himself dead, finally landed in the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) net on Saturday. He and his wife were arrested from their residence in Punjabi Bagh area, almost 35 years after he committed the crime.
While the CBI refused to share details of the case, sources in the police who accompanied the CBI team to arrest the accused, Nirmal Singh, and his wife Parminder Kaur Bath, said he had committed a bank fraud of Rs 2.5 lakh in 1985 and a case was registered against him at the Sector 30 police station in Chandigarh.The case was handed over to the CBI in 1990 and in 1993, he was declared a proclaimed offender by a CBI court.
Later, his wife Parminder Kaur produced a death certificate of her husband, claiming he died in an accident, after which the investigations in the case were shelved, the sources said.
The accused not only managed to prove himself dead in the records, but also changed his identity and fled to the USA, where he even got permanent residency.
The police sources said Nirmal Singh, in connivance with his wife Parminder Kaur, who runs a private web news channel in Patiala, had allegedly produced a dead body of an individual from Uttar Pradesh and claimed it to be that of Nirmal Singh to get the fake death certificate issued.
Nirmal reportedly returned to India about two months back, after which wife Parminder Kaur had got into a dispute with one of her associates at the web news channel. The associate, Jitinder Stephen, had filed a police complaint against her at the local civil lines police station. While looking into the complaint, the police discovered that her husband Nirmal Singh was actually wanted by the CBI in a 35-year-old case, after which the matter reached the investigating agency.
The CBI team led by Vikas Kumar arrived at their residence on Saturday morning and detained the couple, who were taken to Chandigarh. As Nirmal complained of health issues, the CBI team called an ambulance in which he was taken away. A woman constable from the civil lines police station was also called to escort Parminder Kaur to CBI’s Chandigarh office.