Two brothers from Haryana have been arrested in Australia for stabbing to death a 22-year-old MTech student from India. Abhijeet and Robin Gartan were arrested in New South Wales’s Goulburn on Tuesday, two days after the fatal stabbing of Navjeet Sandhu in the Melbourne suburb of Ormond, officials said.
“Brothers Abhijeet Abhijeet and Robin Gartan were arrested in Goulburn with the assistance of NSW Police,” the Victoria Police said in an official statement.
The victim and the accused were residents of Haryana’s Karnal.
According to the victim’s uncle, Sandhu was “fatally stabbed in the chest” with a knife by another student when he was trying to mediate a confrontation in a rent-related dispute between a group of Indian students. Navjeet’s 30-year-old friend also sustained injuries in the incident.
“Navjeet’s friend (another Indian student) had asked him to accompany him to his house to pick up his belongings as he had a car. While his friend went inside, Navjeet heard some shouting and saw there was a fight. When Navjeet tried to intervene asking them not to fight, he was fatally stabbed in the chest with a knife,” Sandhu’s uncle Yashvir was quoted as saying by the news agency PTI.
Navjeet was a brilliant student and was to join his family in July for vacations, his uncle said.
He said that Navjeet had moved to Australia on a study visa one-and-a-half years ago and his father, a farmer, had sold one-and-half acres of their land to fund his education.
Earlier, Victoria Police released details and images of the two brothers they were searching for in the stabbing incident in Ormond on Sunday.
Abhijeet is 26 years old and was described as being 170cm tall with a solid build and black hair. Gartan, 27, was also described as being 170cm tall with a solid build and black hair.
