On the night of her 19th birthday on August 23, 2001, Sonia Punia and her husband Sanjeev Kumar committed one of Haryana’s most chilling crimes, bludgeoning eight members of her family – including her father, former MLA Relu Ram Punia, her stepmother, two siblings, a sister-in-law and three minor children – to death with iron rods and sticks as they slept at their home in Hisar’s Uklana.

Sonia was convicted for the murders along with Sanjeev, with the prosecution linking it to her motive that she was being driven out of Relu Ram’s massive properties worth hundreds of crores.

Now, 24 years after the massacre shocked the nation, the property dispute in the Punia family has again come into the spotlight.

In a recent order, Justice Surya Pratap Singh of the Punjab and Haryana High Court set

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