Hemant Kaushal, a 40-year-old man was shot dead in front of his 13-year-old son as he was trying to save his son’s future by telling the robbers, who were wearing helmets and robbing the shop by taking all the gold, in north Delhi’s Adarsh Nagar on Tuesday afternoon.
The three robbers are not identified yet, said Aslam Khan, deputy commissioner of police (north-west). Describing the incident, the child said that his father was teaching him in an enclosure at their showroom when the robbers came around at 4. Store attendant Ashok Kumar was the first person the robbers ran into once inside.
“I asked the men to take off their helmets, but they responded by pulling out pistols. They asked me to call the showroom owner,” said Kumar. When Kaushal came out of the enclosure, he and Kumar were forced to lie down on the floor. “The robbers realised that I too was at the store and forced me to come out at gunpoint and lie down beside my father. When they threatened to kill me, my father requested them to take away all the jewellery,” said Kaushal’s son.
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Security camera footage showed the robbers emptying multiple trays of jewellery into bags they had brought along. “When they began leaving, my father rose on his feet and begged them to leave behind some jewellery for me and my sister’s future. My father tried to stop one of them, which led to a scuffle,” recounted the boy.
The scuffle resulted in Kaushal pushing one of the robbers on a sofa. “Another robber responded by shooting my father many times,” said the boy. As the robbers fled the boy called up the police and meanwhile loaded his father into an e-rickshaw and took him to a nearby private hospital where he was declared brought dead. Khan said efforts are on to use the CCTV footage of the crime to identify the suspects.