When the Ludhiana police announced the arrest of Major Singh at the end of November 2005, they took out of storage the files of seven murders that had gathered dust for as long as thirty-four years. He was fifty-five, a chronic opium smuggler known also as Jagga and as Jagan Nath, who had lived for years in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh under assumed names. The superintendent of police for detection, Gurpreet Singh, described a man for whom murder was the answer to anyone who troubled him. The police declined to call him a serial killer, on the ground that he had a clear motive for four of the seven killings; the others, they said, were done in a fit of rage or for his own satisfaction.
The first, as the police told it, came in 1971. He had been arrested several times for supplying opium, and while he was out on bail he went to Uttar Pradesh with another smuggler, Mukhtiar Singh, to buy the drug. They quarreled over sharing the proceeds and he killed him. Mukhtiar Singh's body was never found, and his name remained on the list of proclaimed narcotics offenders until 2005.
A Punjab Police constable named Bihari Lal had the job of serving court summons on him in the smuggling cases, and however often Major Singh changed his name and address, the constable found him. In 1981 Major Singh, a woman named Harbans Kaur and an accomplice, Dayal Singh, tricked him into eating poisoned food and left his body on a railway line. The beheaded body was at first taken for an accident victim, until a chemical examination found the poison. The Malerkotla police arrested Harbans Kaur and Dayal Singh. Major Singh could not be found.
He had fled to Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh, and opened a roadside eating place, a dhaba, on the outskirts of the city. A servant there named Raju killed Major Singh's teenage son after a minor quarrel. Major Singh, the police said, beheaded Raju, cooked his head and ate it. He then changed his identity again and became a truck driver, and ran down two men on a bicycle who had made a gesture at him. He also confessed, according to the police, to killing a man he had argued with at a dhaba in Ludhiana. The published account names six victims or incidents; the seventh is not described.
All of this comes from what the police said at the time of the arrest, reported by The Tribune's Ludhiana edition on December 1, 2005. The police expected more cases to surface in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. No later report of a charge sheet, a trial, a verdict or a sentence has been found, and none of the killings attributed to him has been proved in court.