Attackers of Umar Khalid arrested, confess to crime

New Delhi: Around eight days after Jawaharlal Nehry University scholar Umar Khalid was attacked near the Constitution Club of India, the Special Cell of Delhi Police on Monday arrested the two accused, who had already confessed to their crime in a video that went viral on social media.

The accused, Naveen Dalal and Darvesh Shahpur, were arrested from the outskirts of Delhi-Haryana border.

Police sources said that both were picked up on Monday following a tip-off.

They had earlier switched off their cell phones to escape from the radar of technical surveillance.

One of the two men has a striking resemblance to the man caught in the CCTV footage on the day of the attack.

The Special Cell was in search of the two men after they posted a video confessing the attack in which they were seen to be in a village in Haryana. Their pictures with several politicians were also found uploaded on their Facebook accounts.

Dalal and Shahpur, both natives of Haryana, had said that they would surrender at the house of Sikh revolutionary, Kartar Singh Sarabha, on August 17.

However, they never turned up as the villagers of Sarabha village in Ludhiana turned hostile. Later, the Special Cell teams started gathering human intelligence on the two as they went underground.

Surprisingly, when the police teams were in search of them, Shahpur and Dalal once again made a video and uploaded it on Facebook.

The one minute 18 second-long video, uploaded on August 19, claimed that they had attended former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's funeral on August 17 in the national Capital.

They claimed that they were unable to surrender on the assured date as they needed to attend the funeral.

They further threatened Khalid in the video and ended the video by reciting the Urdu patriotic poem, 'Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna.'

"Their narration is matching the sequence of events of the attack on Khalid. We are interrogating both of them," said a senior police officer.

While Shahpur is a native of Hisar district and claims to be associated with Gau Rakshak Dal in Jind, Dalal is reportedly is the founder of Gau Rakshak Sena and belongs to Jhajjar district.

Police are now verifying whether the two accused acted on their own accord or were following the order's of someone else.