Panchkula, April 2
The court of the District and Sessions Judge today acquitted Tanmay Arora, a resident of Amritsar, of the charges of murdering his friend Simran Kaur Kundra also a native of Amritsar.

Tanmay was acquitted of all the charges after the prosecution failed to justify the murder charges against him. A detailed order of the copy in the case has not been provided yet.

The case dates back to April 30 last year when Tanmay had allegedly murdered Simran, a student of the International Institute of Fashion Design, (INIFD), Chandigarh. She was living in a rented accommodation in Sector 15, Panchkula. The police had booked the accused after he surrendered on May 14 last year.

The chargesheet filed by the Panchkula police in the case stated that it was on April 30 last year that Tanmay had reached Simran’s house in Panchkula, where he had found her in the company of three other youths, who were not known to him. After they left, Tanmay in a fit of rage allegedly hit Simran’s head against the bathroom wall and strangulated her. Later, he allegedly dumped her body in a vacant plot near Lidhran village on the Jalandhar-Amritsar National Highway. Tanmay had surrendered before the Panchkula Police on the intervening night of May 13 and 14 last year.

The local police had had found Simran's car abandoned in the Sector 16 market, Panchkula, on May 1, last year. They came to know about her Amritsar address from the documents recovered from the car, which bore the registration number of Amritsar.

It was on the basis of her father’s complaint that the Panchkula Police had lodged a missing person’s complaint at Sector 15 police post in Panchkula. But after recovering her body, the cops had converted missing complaint into a murder case and registered a case against her former husband Karan Mehra and her close friend, Tanmay under Sections 302 (murder), 364 (kidnapping) and 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence) of the IPC.

Simran had been living in Sector 15 since 2010. Earlier, it was suspected that her former husband Karan Mehra, who she married in 2004 but later divorced him in April 2011, may be involved in the case. But during investigations, the cops also gave him a clean chit.