Thirty-seven-year-old Rajnikant Pandya ran an off-license called Anita’s in Sutton, South London, England. He also lived above the shop with his wife and their two daughters, aged nine and sixteen.
At a little past nine p.m. on November 28th, 2001, a man clad in dark clothing and an animal mask entered the establishment and shot Rajnikant twice, once in the stomach and once in the heart. The victim was killed instantly. His daughters, who had been in the apartment upstairs, were unharmed.
Strangely, even though the intention of the attack seemed to be robbery, the assailant did not take the £140 in the till or anything else in the shop. The shooting was captured on the store’s CCTV camera, but the perpetrator was unidentifiable.
When police arrived, witnesses told them that a group of boys had been running across the street at about the time of the incident. Authorities tried to track down the boys to rule them out as suspects or see if they had any pertinent information, but none of them were ever found.
Later on, investigators also heard from the victim’s brother that Rajnikant had been apprehensive about the increasing crime in the area and was considering moving back to India. Sadly, he never got the chance.
Six individuals were arrested shortly after the crime. Still, of the six, two of the persons of interest—a seventeen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old—were eliminated as suspects, and another man, a thirty-seven-year-old, was bailed. A fourth man, thirty-one, was charged, but with a different crime. The other two individuals were not charged.
The case subsequently went cold, and is still unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 