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RUDHRAPUR: A group of cattle thieves shot dead the company commander of a home guard unit in a village in the Kichha area of Udham Singh Nagar district late on Thursday night.The deceased, identified as Puran Singh Khaira, 50, was allegedly killed by the cattle thieves when he stopped them from stealing two buffaloes from his village Pulbhatta in Kichha.

Khaira was taken to the local community health centre where he was declared brought dead. Senior police officials of the district who rushed to the spot said that they are gathering details through CCTV cameras which were installed at a nearby house.

“Based on the CCTV footage, we have found that there was a gang of four armed men who shot at Khaira around 3 am when he tried to stop them from stealing cattle,” said Sadanand Date, senior superintendent of police (SSP) Udham Singh Nagar. Late evening on Friday, one of the four accused, identified as Tahir, was arrested by police who also recovered a country-made pistol of 0.12 bore and 3 live cartridges from him. Police officials said they were interrogating him to know the whereabouts of his remaining accomplices.

Meanwhile, recounting the incident, Khaira’s wife Rajinder Kaur said, “We were sleeping when we heard cattle mooing in distress. My husband went to take a look at the cattle shed since he was worried if some wild animal was trying to enter there. He found on reaching there that some men were taking away two buffaloes. After he challenged them, they fired at him and ran away. He was lying in a pool of blood when we found him.”

This is not the first time that cattle smugglers in the area have fatally attacked a person. On December 12, 2015, Uttarakhand police constables Basant Bora and Jitendra Kumar were chasing a group of five cattle smugglers who had attempted a theft in Mahtosh village in Gadarpur area of the district. The thieves ran their vehicle over the bike which the constables were riding.While Bora died on the spot, Kumar sustained grievous injuries. Two of the smugglers were later arrested from Katghar area in UP’s Moradabad while the rest are still absconding.