Three persons have been arrested for running a fake government job recruitment racket and duping four applicants in Delhi-NCR of Rs 24 lakh, police said on Monday.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) Rajiv Ranjan said the three accused admitted to have duped a large number of youths in Delhi, Bihar and other states in similar fashion.

The accused — Shashi Bhushan, 26, Sandeep Sidhana, 36, Sheetal Kumar, 30 — were arrested after a complaint was received from one Keshav, who alleged that Bhushan and his associates had cheated him and others of Rs 24 lakh on the pretext of providing government jobs in Railways, FCI, Military Engineering, Department of Post and Union Bank of India, among others.

The police arrested Bhushan on August 5 from Patna, Bihar.

“He was brought to Delhi. At his instance, Sidhana was arrested from Saket and Kumar from Sarai Kale Khan.”

Fake appointment letters, academic documents of victims, fake ID cards, fake official stamps, laptops, etc., were recovered from their possession.

The complainant used to run a small business in Gurgaon. He met Bhushan through a common friend in March 2016.

He managed to convince him that he would arrange for a ticket checker’s job for Keshav’s cousin in the Indian Railways.

In April 2016, Keshav gave him Rs 6 lakh to get him the job. Through Keshav, Bhushan and his gang duped three others.

“Efforts are being made to identify other victims and to apprehend the remaining associates in this case.”

A day after a woman was thrashed and paraded naked by a mob in Bihar’s Bihiya town in Bhojpur district, the police arrested 15 suspects, but denied that it was a case of mob lynching.

S.K. Singhal, Additional Director General (police headquarters), said 15 persons have been arrested on the basis of video footage of the incident.

“It was not a case of mob lynching at all. The police have been investigating it. None of the culprits would be spared,” Singhal said.

The ADG said the incident took place after the body of a youth was found on railway track in Bihiya town in Bhojpur district, about 90 km from Patna, on Monday.

“The cause of his death will be known after post-mortem,” Singhal said.

Bhojpur superintendent of police Avakash Kumar has suspended the police station officer on charge of negligence of duty.

The local police said soon after the body of 19-year-old Bimlesh, who had been reported missing, was found on the railway track, a mob from his village first staged a protest and then attacked a few people living in the adjoining red light area.

Some people blamed a woman for the death, police sources said.

They said the mob rushed to her house and dragged her to the street. She was beaten up and paraded naked, they said.

A police team that reached the spot hours later was attacked by the mob. The police had to open fire to save the woman. Later she was admitted to a local hospital, police sources said.

The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Rajasthan government to apprise it of the action the state has taken in a lynching case in Alwar district in July.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud asked the Principal Secretary of the state’s Home Department to file an affidavit on a plea seeking contempt of court proceedings against the state government.

It sought the affidavit on the action taken to prevent future incidents of lynching. Asking for the affidavit to be filed in one week, the court posted the matter for the next hearing on August 30.

Senior advocate Indira Jaising, appearing for petitioner Tehseen Poonawala, had sought the initiation of contempt of court proceedings against the state government, contending just a few days after the apex court’s directions on the lynching incident in Alwar.

The bench asked the Rajasthan government whether any disciplinary action has been taken against the police officers who allegedly took three hours to reach a hospital with a badly injured man accused of smuggling cows.

The counsel appearing for Rajasthan told the bench that action has been taken. The central and state governments have come under sharp criticism from the top court over frequent lynching incidents across the country.

The court had condemned the mob lynching incidents and suggested enactment of a law in Parliament to deal with the crime that threatens the rule of law and the country’s social fabric.

Rakbar Khan, 28, was beaten to death by suspected cow vigilantes in Alwar district on July 24.

Alwar had earlier also witnessed similar attacks in the name of cow protectionism. The latest killing comes more than a year after Pehlu Khan was murdered allegedly by some cow vigilantes in April 2017.

Fifteen people were injured on Monday in a road accident in Jammu and Kashmir’s Poonch district, police said.

Two vehicles collided head-on at around 8 a.m. in Mandi area.

“The injured have been shifted to hospital,” the police added.

Four persons, including two juveniles, have been arrested on charge of killing a man and injuring his cousin on Sunday in west Delhi, police said.

“The two had gone out of their house around 1.30 a.m. in Vijay Vihar and asked a group of youths about a shop. The four accused were drunk and picked up a fight with them,” a police official said.

He said that the victims were attacked with a knife. One of the two injured was declared brought dead at hospital.

Swami Agnivesh was allegedly heckled and assaulted near the BJP headquarters here today by some people, who the social activist said were BJP workers when he was on his way to pay homage to former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

A video of the alleged attack that circulated on social media showed some people heckling the 79-year-old social activist.

“I was attacked while walking towards BJP headquarters to pay my respects to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Around 20-30 BJP workers came and surrounded me and pushed me. My pagdi fell down and they started calling me a traitor,” Agnivesh told reporters.

“They pushed me towards the Vishnu Digamber roundabout and kept abusing me. Some policemen were standing there but these persons, including some women, carrying slippers, kept abusing me,” he added. The social activist claimed that he had informed BJP leader and Union minister Harsh Vardhan before visiting there and will be lodging a formal complaint with the police about the assault.

“The police have so far not reached out to me. I will be filing a police complaint. I was attacked earlier also and no arrests have been made in the case. There is an atmosphere of violence and intolerance,” he said. Last month, he was allegedly assaulted by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) activists, during his visit to Pakur in Jharkhand.

A Sikh store-owner has been stabbed to death in the US state of New Jersey, in a third incident targeting the community in the country in the last three weeks.

Terlok Singh was found dead by his cousin Karnail Singh on Thursday in his East Orange suburb store with apparent stab wounds, WABC TV reported.

The assailant had put a knife in his chest, Karnail Singh told the station. Terlok Singh had a wife and children in India. He owned Park Deli and Grocery store in the US to support them.

The Essex County Prosecutor’s office called the incident a homicide, reported ABC7NY.

WNBC TV reported that the police did not have a motive for the killing and had made no arrest as of Thursday evening.

A worker interviewed from a nearby petrol station said he found Terlok Singh’s body in a puddle of blood in the bathroom of the store.

Customers who spoke to the TV said the victim was “extremely generous”. One of them, Anthony Pointdexter, said Terlok Singh was a “great guy and never bothered anybody”.

Two Sikhs were attacked in separate incidents in California over the past few weeks, but they survived the assaults.

On July 31 in Keyes, Surjit Singh Malhi, 50, was attacked by two men when he was putting up a campaign sign for Republican Congressman Jeff Denham, KCRA TV said.

Malhi said they shouted at him, beat him and spray-painted his truck with a white nationalist symbol and wrote “go back to your country” on it, according to the station.

Malhi said that his turban saved him by acting like a helmet and absorbing the blows. The police were considering it a hate crime.

On August 6, Sahib Singh Natt, 71, was thrown to the ground and spat on by two people in Manteca, about 40 km from Keyes.

The police arrested two teenagers and charged them with attempted robbery, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon, but not a hate crime.

One of them, Tyrone McAllister, 18, an African American, is the son of police chief Darryl McAllister of Union City.

Earlier, an Indian woman, Sasikala Narra, and her six-year-old son were stabbed to death in another New Jersey town, Maple Shade, in March 2017 but that case has not been solved.

A banking court here on Friday issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against former President and PPP co-chairman Asif Zardari in a multi-billion money laundering scam, the media reported.

The court directed the authorities to present Zardari and other suspects before it by September 4. However, Pakistan Peoples Party spokesperson Farhatullah Babar issued a statement citing Zardari’s counsel Farooq Naek as saying that no warrant against the leader was issued, Dawn online reported.

The Federal Investigation Agency is investigating 32 people, including Zardari and his sister Faryal Talpur, in relation to money laundering from fictitious accounts. Zardari’s close aide Hussain Lawai was arrested last month in connection with the probe.

The banking court earlier approved an extension in Talpur’s interim bail until the next hearing.

The case revolves around a 2015 inquiry into suspicious transactions when 29 “benami” accounts were identified — 16 of them in the Summit Bank, eight in the Sindh Bank and five in the United Bank Limited.

The fake accounts were allegedly used for channelling funds received in the form of heavy bribes and kickbacks.

Zardari and Talpur, among others were said to be involved in using certain bank accounts for suspicious transactions totalling Rs 35 billion.

Hussain Lawai, former chairman of the Pakistan Stock Exchange and a close aide of Zardari, Omni Group of Companies chairman Khawaja Anvar Majeed and his brother Ghani Majeed along with co-accused Taha Raza — head of the Summit Bank’s corporate unit — have already been arrested in the case.

A Madhya Pradesh court has awarded death sentence to a man for abducting, sodomising and murdering a 10-year-old boy in Datia district.

Special Judge (POCSO) Hitendra Dwivedi imposed the extreme penalty on Nand Kishore Gupta late on Monday.

According to public prosecutor Pushpendra Kumar Garg, Gupta had kidnapped the victim from Indergarh on March 2. He, along with his accomplice, kept the boy hostage and demanded Rs 1 lakh ransom from the father.

When the family failed to pay up, they sodomised and killed the boy and disposed of the body in the Deluva canal.

The judge, in his order, held Gupta guilty under various sections of the Indian Penal Code for kidnapping for ransom, murder and unnatural offence. He was also found guilty under the relevant provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act.

Gupta was also fined Rs 85,000.

Unidentified assailants on Tuesday forced their way into a senior government officer’s residence here and shot him dead, police said.

Rajiv Kumar, Under Secretary in the Planning Department, succumbed to his injuries in a hospital, the police said.

The officer’s wife told the police that a group of five armed youths forcibly entered their official house in the high security zone in the state capital. Kumar was shot when he resisted them, she said.