Washington: Nearly seven years after an Indian national was killed in the US, the FBI and the Las Vegas Police have arrested a man for allegedly shooting the 27-year-old worker dead at a gas station in California, the police said.
Manpreet Ghuman Singh, a native of Punjab’s Majri Kishnewally village in Fatehgarh Sahib town, was working at the gas station in the resort city of South Lake Tahoe in California when he was shot dead by an unknown assailant on August 6, 2013.
After years of investigation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department police arrested 34-year-old Sean Donohoe on charges of killing Singh.
“Almost 7 years ago, on August 6th, 2013, an unknown man wearing a face mask walked into US Gasoline Station, at 2470 Lake Tahoe Blvd, shot and killed the clerk, Manpreet Singh of South Lake Tahoe. The case went cold, but has now been solved,” South Lake Tahoe police said in a tweet on Tuesday.
Donohoe, who lives in Las Vegas, was a resident of South Lake Tahoe city at the time of the incident.
In a statement, the South Lake Tahoe Police Department said that on August 6, 2013, an unknown man wearing a face mask walked into the US Gasoline Station at 2470 Lake Tahoe Blvd, shot and killed the clerk, Singh of South Lake Tahoe, California.
The killer then strolled out the front door and fled. The case eventually went cold with no leads, the police said.
Thereafter the case was assigned to the El Dorado County Cold Case Task Force, which is a collaboration between the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office, the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office, South Lake Tahoe Police Department, California Department of Justice (DOJ), Bureau of Forensic Science (BFS) and the FBI.
In July 2017, the El Dorado District Attorney’s Office posted a video about the homicide, hoping that new leads would be generated.
A witness watched the video and contacted investigators in the summer of 2019. The witness told investigators that Donohoe was responsible for the murder.
Investigators followed the new information and worked on the case extensively since receiving the lead.
California DOJ, BFS compared DNA evidence collected from the investigation and Donohoe matched that evidence. The El Dorado County Cold Case Task Force travelled extensively to interview the involved parties.
Today, with the help of the FBI and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Donohoe was arrested for the murder of Singh, it said in a statement.